How Shopify Local Delivery & EasyRoutes Help Small Businesses

In response to the 2020 pandemic, Shopify, an ecommerce platform aimed at establishing an online market for small businesses, has stepped up their game. Shopify Local Delivery is a new app that allows businesses to create optimized delivery routes and streamline the customer delivery process. Shopify has focused specifically on their brick-and-mortar customers. Many of these users lost a significant amount of business as a result of the COVID storefront closures, and they’re hoping to make up for it by increasing their online sales.

What are the advantages of Shopify Local Delivery for small businesses?

Why should I have to use UPS or Fedex to ship orders if I only deliver to customers within a 20-mile radius?” Shopify launched Local Delivery to answer this question for local businesses.

Customers can use Local Delivery to have their goods delivered directly to them, bypassing delivery companies and saving money. It achieves this goal by compiling addresses and orders for the business owner to send their own delivery person rather than relying on a third-party delivery service.

The most important feature of the Local Delivery app is the optimized routing software, which EasyRoutes promotes. For businesses that are new to the delivery process, route optimization software is especially useful. If a Shopify business only has ten employees and one of them is suddenly assigned the role of delivery driver, they will most likely have no idea how to plan an efficient route. Apps like Local Delivery or EasyRoutes automatically map out a driver’s destinations in an optimized manner rather than analyzing the route of deliveries themselves.

While we applaud Shopify for keeping up with the times and offering alternative delivery options to their customers, every optimized delivery app has its own set of strengths and weaknesses. So, in this guide, we’ll see how Shopify Local Delivery compares to EasyRoutes in terms of delivery capacity, app accessibility, and optimization software intelligence.

Delivery Capacity

The amount of orders your business can fill using the app is called delivery capacity, and there’s a big difference between Shopify Local Delivery and EasyRoutes. Shopify Local Delivery’s delivery capacity is capped at 100 stops. If you run a one-store operation with a few dozen orders per day, you’re probably fine with these constraints. However, it’s possible that you shouldn’t be. Consider when orders are particularly plentiful: pre-Christmas sales, Cyber Monday, and Black Friday. During peak seasons, if you’re limited to 100 deliveries per day, you may experience delays and unhappy customers.

EasyRoutes is the way to go if you want to maximize the number of deliveries you can make in a day.

We have plans to assist businesses of all sizes, including those that are just getting started. Our plans are suitable for individuals who make their own deliveries as well as those who manage large delivery fleets. EasyRoutes has no limit on the number of deliveries you can make. This gives you the ability to handle a higher volume of orders and expedite shipments to your customers.

If your business grows and you start receiving hundreds of orders per day, Shopify Local Delivery isn’t going to cut it. EasyRoutes is the ideal solution for a growing company with increasing delivery demands. ‍

User Experience

The term “user experience” refers to how a simple it is to pick up and use an app, and EasyRoutes has a clear advantage here. EasyRoutes is for anyone who wants to make multiple stops quickly and easily. Delivery drivers, bakeries, breweries, distilleries, butchers, coffee shops, florists, groceries, meal kits, produce, or subscription box suppliers are all examples of users who need to visit multiple addresses per day to be successful.

Shopify is an excellent ecommerce platform, and Shopify Local Delivery is seamlessly integrated with your orders. This eliminates the need to export orders and then re-import them into a different route planning app. After that, you’ll need to go back into your Shopify orders and update the statuses and correct any errors. It takes a long time and is inconvenient.

Your Shopify orders are also fully integrated with EasyRoutes. We’re great at providing routes for small online businesses to fulfill orders to local customers, similar to Shopify Local Delivery. EasyRoutes, on the other hand, does not stop there.

Route Optimization Intelligence

One factor outweighs the rest when it comes to route optimization apps: getting where you need to go as quickly as possible. Take a look at how EasyRoutes and Shopify Local Delivery differ in terms of optimization intelligence.

The navigational algorithms used by EasyRoutes are designed to sort through thousands of combinations to find the best route for you or your driver, taking into account a large amount of data. You can then open these stops in your preferred navigation app to take advantage of the most up-to-date traffic and weather data. EasyRoutes is compatible with all of your favorite applications.

Shopify Local Delivery routes are planned using Google Maps. Despite the fact that Google Maps takes into account the time of day, average traffic patterns, and the number of stops, it is not known for being the most reliable navigator.

Best Overall: EasyRoutes vs. Shopify Local Delivery

Shopify Local Delivery, based on our observations, is designed to be extremely convenient for businesses that already use the Shopify online platform.

EasyRoutes, on the other hand, allows you to do a number of things that Shopify Local Delivery simply cannot.

Shopify Local Delivery is limited to orders marked as local delivery. However, if a customer who ordered an item for pick-up wants to switch it to delivery, you are out of luck. You have no way of accessing that order, and you can’t change the order status itself!

EasyRoutes, however, lets you access all your orders, no matter what the status or even when it was placed. You can use a livd search bar or filters to narrow down the orders to the exact ones you need.

An additional benefit of being able to access all orders, is that you can access previously placed orders. That means if your business requires both delivery and pick-up, you can use the same completed order in a later route for pick-up.

EasyRoutes also lets you create multiple routes with just one click. Select your orders and the number of routes you want and EasyRoutes can split your orders into those routes. All you have to do is share them with your drivers.

With Shopify Local Delivery, however, each route would need to be created individually, mean you would you have to know what orders to put into each route.

EasyRoutes takes the cake when it comes to customization, flexibility, and options for couriers of all kinds.