Sherpa ready for huge delivery demand – no Christmas cut-off date

(Source: Supplied)

Although last year’s festive season saw an extraordinary spike in delivery demand, this Christmas is expected to surpass even last year’s record-breaking boom. 

Retailers are being urged to plan for their last-mile logistics as early as possible this year, with the Australia Post cut-off date for delivery by Christmas fast approaching and delivery delays considered virtually inevitable.

However, while it’s officially Australia’s Number One same-day delivery partner by volume of deliveries, Sherpa has no Christmas cut-off date and can guarantee same-day delivery right up until 6pm on Christmas Eve.

“We have no set-up fees, no technology fees and no subscription fees. Our customers can simply pay per delivery and we offer two-hour, four-hour and same-day delivery. That’s all we do. It’s our sole focus and so we’re fully-equipped to service hundreds – if not thousands – of Aussie retailers this Christmas peak trading season,” explains Duncan Brett, CEO of Sherpa.

With a fleet of 10,000 crowd-sourced drivers operating across 17 Australian capital cities, including many regional areas, Sherpa forecasts it will complete 650,000 same-day deliveries during November and December – an increase of more than 90 per cent on last year’s Christmas period peak and a whopping 390-per-cent increase on Christmas 2019.

“We’ve been long preparing for this holiday season. We know it will be by far our biggest yet, so we’ve ramped up all areas of our operations accordingly,” Brett said.

“As same-day delivery specialists, we’re especially adept when it comes to scalability. We can respond rapidly to our customers’ delivery needs without incurring exponential growth in costs to our customers, which currently include the likes of Woolworths, Roses Only, Dan Murphy’s and thousands more businesses, large and small.

“We’re flexible. We can deal with a single delivery one day and 100 deliveries the next day for the same customer, and we’re absolutely committed to making the last-mile delivery process a smooth one for our retail partners. 

“We offer our retail partners a range of service options including full API integration for enterprise-level large volume bookings, bulk CSV upload services for large volume bookings without tech integration, or a simple single booking process via our website or the Sherpa app.

“In particular, we’re predicting huge demand this festive season in the key categories of groceries, gifting, hampers, alcohol and general retail.

“We’ve now completed our five-millionth delivery since our inception in 2014. It was not that long ago that we were at the mark of 4 million. We are growing fast and it’s because the demand for our services is growing exponentially,” adds Brett.

According to Australia Post data released in August of this year, online purchases were up 27 per cent year-on-year in the 12 months to July 2021. Driving this strong growth were 5.6 million Australian households that purchased online in July 2021 – up 4.9 per cent from June 2021.

The Australia Post Inside Australian Online Shopping eCommerce Update also reports that the online share of retail spend was 16.3 per cent during the 2021 financial year, up from 11.3 per cent in 2019. Online retail spend is now $52 billion in Australia, up 31 per cent year-on-year.

Sherpa was voted ‘Best Carrier’ by the National Online Retailers Association in 2019 and won the runner-up accolade for 2021.

For more information, www.sherpa.net.au.