Amazon has experimented, adapted, and now appears to be present in every aspect of e-commerce. The days when Amazon sold just books feels like a bygone era of the Internet. As it has grown its dominant business network, it has taught us about our two-day delivery and “free shipping” addictions, and has raised our digital shopping expectations in every way. Many retail and e-commerce businesses discovered they couldn’t compete with Amazon’s curation, scope, pricing, or delivery along the way. But now with tools like Shopify, Supertime and EasyRoutes, small businesses can compete!

While most customers appreciate Amazon’s ruthless convenience, the experience started to feel inauthentic somewhere along the way. Furthermore, many customers noticed that Amazon was profiting from a significant portion of the money they spent on a daily basis. As Amazon’s dominance grew, especially in COVID, where so many businesses were struggling, it felt unbalanced. Many shoppers want to support local businesses, especially as the world recovers from the pandemic. Consumers spent $861.12 billion on online purchases with US merchants alone in 2020. Most people have forgotten about a bustling Main Street and the unique, more personalized experience it offers.

Businesses of all sizes can now compete with Amazon by leveraging new technology partners like Shopify, Supertime, and EasyRoutes. They can also cater to new audiences and provide unique, branded, and efficient levels of service, in addition to better serving existing customers with delivery.

Shopify makes it possible for companies of all sizes to compete online

Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows users to create and manage online stores. It aids in the organization of a retailer’s website’s layout for a pleasing, customer-focused user experience, as well as payment processing. Through its simple platform, over 1.7 million businesses have created an e-commerce channel.

Supertime lets you collect delivery dates and times

Supertime is a simple and powerful delivery date picker app that gives your customers the ability to pick a date and time for local delivery or in-store pickup, right from your Shopify store cart page.

Give your customers the convenience of picking a delivery date and time slot that works for them, with the convenient superpowers of creating schedules that works for you and your business.

Here are some of the cool things about it:

• It works out-of-the-box
• Supertime’s automatic mode works with all free themes and popular themes from the Shopify Theme Store
• You can Show Supertime in every language/region and in every date/time format.
• Add dates/times to your customer email templates, order status page, and export to Google Calendar via Zapier.
• Export to Order Tags and Notes
• See date/time information in your Orders page, packing slips and receipts.
• Customers can use Supertime (e.g. our date picker / calendar, and time slot selector) to select a delivery method, delivery date and time slot on your cart page based your availability.
• Create as many delivery methods as you need, from local delivery to in-store pickup, and make as many schedules as you need with different dates and time slots for your delivery methods. Get creative!
• Create custom time slots of your choosing. Schedule breaks in during your day.
• Set a limit to how many orders you can actually handle – by slot or date.
• Use our blackout calendar to block off dates you don’t want customers to select, like holidays.
• Add special dates and time slots to your schedule.
• Specify how long you need to prepare each order, allowing you to do things like same-day or next-day delivery.
• Ask your customer to share their postal code or zip code to confirm their eligibility before they can choose and date and time for local delivery.
• You can view all your orders at a glance, with sortable dates and times.

Control your dates and times by setting all the scheduling parameters for your local delivery, pickup and shipping needs. You can set what days of the week you wish to offer deliveries or pickups, set up time slots for customers to choose from, set order limits for those time slots so you’re not overrun, blackout dates, prep-time needed for your orders, and more! Supertime adds date and time selectors from your schedule to your store cart page. Your customer can choose their method of delivery and select a date and time for it using an easy-to-use calendar pop-up.

Use EasyRoutes to Manage your Deliveries on Shopify

EasyRoutes is a feature-packed local delivery manager and route planner app for Shopify that has all the tools you need to deliver your own orders. You can plan local delivery routes, manage and dispatch drivers, and keep customers informed with tracking pages, delivery notifications, and proof of delivery.

Just select which orders need to be delivered, and EasyRoutes will guide you through the rest. In seconds you can generate optimized local delivery routes with itemized inventories. Route planning has never been so easy and quick.

After you have reviewed your local delivery routes, share them with your drivers who can use our mobile driver app for IOS and Android to navigate their stops, attach proof of delivery, and mark orders as delivered – all synced to your Shopify Orders.

EasyRoutes is seamlessly integrated with Shopify and your orders. That means that as soon as you open our app your orders will be right there ready to be added to local delivery routes. No need to mess about with exporting/importing spreadsheets anymore!

Streamline every step of your delivery operations and let your customers know when their orders are arriving. EasyRoutes is the only all-in-one route planning and local delivery management app fully integrated with Shopify. Save time and delight your customers with your new local delivery superpowers!‎‎‎‎

Doesn’t Shopify Local Delivery do all this?

No, Shopify’s Local Delivery app is actually pretty basic. We built EasyRoutes to solve every problem merchants have building last-mile and local delivery businesses on Shopify with existing tools. With EasyRoutes you can do all sorts of things you can’t do with Shopify Local Delivery, like:

• Use all your orders for route planning, not just the ones marked “Local Delivery”. You can deliver pickup orders, stops from outside of Shopify, manually entered orders, and orders from your favourite subscription app)
• Plan and make routes using the delivery dates that you’ve collected using a Shopify app, specifically designed shipping rate/method, or tag
• Plan all of your upcoming local deliveries at once — make and optimize multiple routes, plan for more than 100 orders at a time
• Fine-grained local delivery route planning features — make manual edits as you need
• Give your local delivery drivers an app to take proof of delivery photos, signatures and notes for peace of mind.
• Set a time per stop
• See drive times and ETAs
• Schedule local delivery routes for the future
• Identify bad addresses
• Customizable tables and views – show only the data you want to see
• Import local delivery addresses via spreadsheet

Provide modern features and a superior delivery experience to level the playing field

Customers will seek out unique, specialized shopping experiences. They may want to go to a store, or they may prefer delivery, which has become a more permanent habit. Any small to large business can create an online presence, learn about digital shopping best practices, and then fulfill a customer’s pick-up and delivery preferences. Shopify, Supertime, and EasyRoutes have teamed up to offer a more affordable and enjoyable alternative to Amazon’s stock offerings and dominance.