In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by Greg Leibowitz and James Fisher, Co founders of Rendr. The partners started the business in 2018 as a side project after spending their gap year in one of the leading tech hubs of the world, Israel. But it was their tradie mates that inspired them to develop their business, Rendr – a technology fulfilment platform which provides a same day delivery solution for retailers. Rendr now has clients such as Aussie Disposals and Chemist Warehouse and attracted investment from the likes of Ahmed Fahour, ex-CEO of Australia Post and Steven Lew, chairman of Global Retail Brands. In this chat, Greg and James discuss the importance of the local factor in their success, why they believe delivery advancement is customer driven and how they are taking click and collect to new levels of awesome. Rendr caught my eye at this year’s Retail Global on the Gold Coast where I got chatting with the team on the trade floor. While they are at a very early stage, I was impressed by the vision of their young founders and the investment they’ve already attracted.
“It was our love for eCommerce that really brought about Rendr“
James Fisher
Tradie mates
(James) “So we had mates in the trade, in the DIY space that were getting on the tools that would go down to their local hardware store, pick up their its and bits and take it back. And around the same time, Uber, DoorDash were very prominent in the delivery space, particularly in the food space. So we looked straight at the home and hardware space and our mates. That was probably the biggest challenge I found was going into store and not being able to have all their tools just delivered from site.
It was definitely a challenge and that brought about Greg and I’s first real, real tap into that market. So we’d walk down to local hardware stores, walk through the aisles. We first did a bit of market research where we’d bring iPads down and just ask simple questions like, did you purchase more than you originally intended? How much would you pay for delivery of your goods straight to your site or straight to your home?
And then we really got to a point where we could really take this concept and offer it to customers, both from a tradie side, but also a DIY site. Because as you would’ve seen during COVID, it’s sprung about so many DIYs, just doing odd jobs around the house. So we built a Shopify website. We’d walk the aisles of local home and hardware stores, take photos of products and then load them up on the Shopify website.”
Network of carriers
(Greg) “What differentiates us is really this technical or this fulfilment platform that we have built where we aggregate all these different queries and carriers. So we’ve got over 25 providers on our network, whether it’s the crowdsource delivery providers or the professional network who have specialised vehicles, whether it’s refrigerated or tailgates and we provide that single touch point or single integration where the retailer can actually get access to that whole range of different providers that we have on the network. So what that means is let’s say I’m a customer and I go onto a website checkout and I’m at the checkout and there’s rates loading.
When the request is made, we’ll actually go and ask all the different providers on our network for how much the delivery will cost, how quickly they can do it, and also take in a range of different factors, so for example, the time of day, the location and the profile of the freight, and then will work out based on those different calculations, who is the most appropriate carrier to fulfil that specific delivery.”
Click & Deliver
(Greg) “Let’s say you are sitting at home, you are shopping on your favourite brand and you decide to select click and collect because of that convenience and certainty. Like many customers, you actually decide that you want click and collect because you want to get it that same day or the next day and you don’t want to wait a few days for someone to deliver the order to you. So you select click and collect and you receive a few hours later or a few minutes later, or even days later depending on the retailer, you receive that message that says, “Hey, Nathan, your order from store X is ready to be picked up. Come and get it, or pay $5 or $10 or whatever the retailer wants to offer to have that order delivered to you same day or buy 5:00 PM tonight.”
And what that means is a customer no longer has to go into store. They no longer have to wait behind people in line. They no longer have to look for parking in the shopping centre. But rather using the network that we’ve developed, they can actually send one of our drivers to go and pick up that order for them. And we’re really finding that customers love this, because they’ve never seen something like this before. And for the merchant, they’re able to offer that surprise and delight experience that James was mentioning by bypassing all these different barriers to entry of offering same day delivery.”
Questions answered in this episode include…
- How do you set up Rendr to make on demand delivery profitable?
- How does Rendr work with retailers from a commercial perspective?
- Can you share how some of your customers are using Rendr as part of their fulfilment options?
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