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Customers are demanding instant gratification when it comes to the delivery of their products, and Home Depot is stepping up its efforts to fulfill their desires. Matthew Townsend reports at Bloomberg that Home Depot “has started same-day delivery across the U.S. to help it stay relevant with consumers’ need-it-yesterday mentality.”
The move is a strategy to compete with fast-delivering e-commerce sites such as Amazon. Townsend writes:
The home-improvement chain had already been using trucks to deliver large items such as building materials from stores in a day or so. Now, aided by startups Roadie Inc. and Deliv Inc. in its top 35 metro markets, online orders made before noon of about 20,000 products — everything from Halloween decorations to power tools — can arrive by van or car the same day, starting at a cost of $8.99.
“We set an overarching goal for our supply chain to be the fastest, most efficient delivery in home improvement,” said Mark Holifield, Atlanta-based Home Depot’s executive vice president of supply chain and product development. Customers “want it cheap, but also want it to be quick.”
To compete with Amazon.com Inc. and other e-commerce companies, retailers are realizing they need to speed delivery of online orders, especially because web purchases are often the fastest-growing part of a chain’s business. This is true for Home Depot, whose online revenue grew more than 20 percent in this year’s first half.
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