Office Depot Inc. announced today it will offer same-day delivery by early next month in Atlanta, Los Angeles and the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area, with more cities to be added before the end of the year.
The office supplies retailer is matching a similar service introduced in June 2016 by chief rival Staples Inc., which offers its Staples Rush service in Boston, Chicago, Dallas and New York. Staples says the service will be extended “soon” to Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.
Both are competing with Amazon.com Inc., which offers free same-day shipping to members of its Amazon Prime program in “5,000 cities and towns” on more than 1 million items. That includes more than 80,000 SKUs in the office supplies category. Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 1000 ranking of North America’s leading online retailers. Staples is No. 5 and Office Depot No. 13.
Office Depot and Staples join the growing number of major retailers offering same-day delivery, largely in response to Amazon’s increasingly aggressive shipping offers. In 2016, 36 of the Top 1000 online retailers in North America offered same-day shipping, up from 30 a year earlier, according to Top500Guide.com.
Providing the same-day delivery service for Office Depot will be Deliv, which handles deliveries for some 4,000 clients, including such major retailers as Macy’s Inc. (No. 6 in the Top 1000), Best Buy Co. Inc. (No. 10) and PetSmart Inc. (No. 365).
“Adding same-day delivery capabilities to our growing in-store pickup and ship-from-store programs allows us to better leverage our retail locations as distribution hubs, and serve our customers faster and more efficiently,” says Kevin Moffitt, senior vice president and chief digital officer at Office Depot.
Customers shopping at OfficeDepot.com will be able to choose same-day delivery windows of 8-11 a.m., 11 a.m.-2 p.m., 2-5 p.m. or 5-8 p.m. The retailer did not immediately respond to a question about whether the same-day service will be available at its site for larger corporate customers, OfficeMaxWorkplace.com. Office Depot and OfficeMax merged in 2013. A proposed merger between Staples and Office Depot was called off last year in the face of government antitrust objections.
Office Depot says it is waiving the delivery fee for an unspecified introductory period, but did not say what it would charge once that period is over. Most retailers working with Deliv that don’t completely subsidize the cost of delivery charge $5-8, says Deliv CEO Daphne Carmeli.
Staples Rush charges $9.99 and promises orders will be delivered by 7 p.m.
Besides offering free same-day delivery to Prime members, Amazon offers free 2-hour delivery through its Prime Now service on a more limited selection of items for orders over $35. Prime Now is available in 33 metropolitan areas that represent about 42% of the U.S. population. Prime members pay $99 per year or $10.99 per month for the program that includes, besides free shipping, free streaming video and other perks.
Deliv handles orders that weigh up to 50 pounds and same-delivery is typically restricted to a distance of 20-25 miles from the pickup point, depending on the market, Carmeli says. Staples’ same-day delivery service handles items up to 70 pounds.
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