Digital pickup and delivery (DPD) has been on the rise over the past two years. Even as things get back to normal, people are hanging on to their new online spending habits. This means that the digital pickup and delivery sales that exploded in 2020 and 2021 are here to stay. The question is, is DPD right for your restaurant?
The Rise of Digital Pickup and Delivery
Over the last twenty years, online sales have been steadily growing. Today, we have hit a crescendo in terms of buying and selling online. The tech has been with us for some time, all we needed was a little push to finally bring DPD home in earnest. It started with online menus, which were relegated to Chinese restaurants and east coast sandwich shops working on the pizza delivery model.Â
But with the rise of apps and mobile tech, services like Uber made the idea of distributed pickup and delivery a reality. Now, people are looking to DoorDash, Instacart, and similar services in order to make some extra money on the side. It doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to foresee DPD expanding to more and more different types of restaurants.
Up to this point, the major resistance has been about the perception of quality. Pickup and delivery has long been seen as a semi-fast-food thing or something for restaurants of middling quality. However, just to survive the last two years, many establishments looked to new ways to do business without running afoul of public health regulations, and digital pickup and delivery has been huge.
For a start, while the numbers are unclear, it seems incontrovertible that DPD has saved some small restaurants that would have gone under without it. What’s more, so many establishments are now adopting the service model that it would be folly to deny its value.
Digital Pickup and Delivery by The Numbers
According to a report by Adobe Analytics, people spent nearly $10 billion on online food purchases in the last two months of 2021, up 12% from the previous year. In 2022, that trend has continued. The report cites pandemic restrictions. But the rise of online purchasing options has certainly had something to do with it.
Today, customers have access to Same-Day shipping, virtually eliminating the problem of having to wait. This has made the idea of ordering food at higher levels of quality a more reasonable proposition.
The second novel shopping option available is curbside pickup. This has become one of the most popular methods by which customers have sought out restaurant-quality food while eating indoors was off the table.
Finally, we have Buy Online, Pick Up In Store (BOPIS). This is a sort of middle ground between traditional shopping and curbside pickup, and as things open back up, it is exploding. Customers now order online for curbside pickup, and if something else occurs to them they can fire up the mobile and use BOPIS.
The numbers have been stable throughout the summer, but according to Digital Commerce 360, the increase of these sales modalities should go up by 14% before the end of the holiday season.
If you want to boost sales for the remainder of 2022, it might not be too late to get on the bandwagon.
