SameDay Delivery is a last-mile courier running grocery and on-demand deliveries across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the New Jersey and Pennsylvania suburbs.
The company has grown to about 130 employees serving roughly 60 stores. It's anchored by a large ShopRite portfolio built on drivers stationed on-site for scheduled delivery windows.
As DoorDash and Uber Eats moved into the market, several lower-volume ShopRite stores found gig couriers cheaper than a dedicated SameDay driver, and some accounts started walking.
SameDay turned to Onfleet, a last-mile delivery platform built for high-frequency, multi-stop operations. Within a year, SameDay grew from 27 to 35 ShopRite stores, increased per-window delivery capacity by 25% at several locations, and pushed monthly order volume from about 8,000 to nearly 10,000.
SameDay Delivery: Last-Mile Logistics Built Around Grocery
Andrea Rodriguez has spent nearly five years at SameDay Delivery, where she leads technology and operational improvement projects. The company’s last-mile business operates across two main models:
- Dedicated delivery: Providing dedicated delivery service for ShopRite stores.
- On-demand delivery: Supporting businesses including grocery stores, wineries, pharmacies, caterers, and bakeries as delivery needs arise.
That flexibility is central to how SameDay operates.
“We don’t put a barrier between our clients and their delivery,” Andrea said. “We’re not going to say, ‘We cannot deliver that.’ We’re going to try to make it happen.”
The Challenge: Losing ShopRite Stores to Gig Couriers
By late 2022, SameDay’s dispatch system, Xcelerator, couldn’t keep pace with what ShopRite needed. It could handle complex workflows, but two gaps were becoming increasingly difficult to ignore:
- Limited proof of delivery: The system was too cumbersome for drivers to reliably capture proof that an order had been delivered.
- No live delivery tracking: ShopRite had no easy way to see where an order stood in real time, a capability competitors like DoorDash and Uber Eats already offered.
For lower-volume ShopRite stores, paying for a dedicated SameDay driver all day became harder to justify when gig couriers could offer more visibility with a more flexible model. Some stores began shifting their delivery business away from SameDay.
ShopRite started pushing SameDay for the same tracking visibility its gig-economy competitors could provide. For SameDay, closing that technology gap had become a competitive necessity.
“We need to be as competitive as the other companies. We need to have the technology. We need to offer the same services or better,” Andrea said.
The Solution: A Last-Mile Delivery Platform Drivers Would Actually Use
Andrea went looking for new dispatch technology, and the deciding factor wasn’t a long feature list. SameDay needed something drivers could use easily throughout a busy delivery day. As Andrea explained, simplicity matters when the company is completing a delivery roughly every five minutes.
That search led SameDay to Onfleet, a last-mile delivery platform built for businesses managing high-volume delivery operations.
Onfleet could meet ShopRite’s growing expectations around delivery tracking and give SameDay the delivery management capabilities it needed, but without introducing more complexity for its team.
“It’s a good tool, friendly for the drivers, friendly for the dispatchers as well. They don’t even need the three screens that they used to have before,” Andrea said.
The Results: More Stores, More Orders, More Capacity Per Window
Once Andrea could see real delivery timing by store, she could stop guessing at driver capacity and start testing what each location could actually handle.
25% More Deliveries Per Window
At several ShopRite stores, SameDay increased capacity from four orders per delivery window to five. Since ShopRite pays a flat weekly fee regardless of volume, SameDay could complete 25% more deliveries for the same price, strengthening its value to each store.
From 27 to 35 ShopRite Stores
Within a year, SameDay grew from 27 to 35 ShopRite store accounts, winning back business it had previously lost to on-demand couriers.
“We have gained stores that we lost in 2023. … We started gaining all those stores back, even if they were small,” Andrea said.
2,000 More Orders Per Month
As SameDay added ShopRite stores and increased capacity at existing locations, monthly order volume grew from around 8,000 to nearly 10,000 deliveries.
Proof of Delivery for Customer Disputes
When a store questioned when or where an order had been delivered, the SameDay team could pull up the exact delivery timestamp and photo to verify what happened.They no longer had to rely on conflicting accounts from drivers, stores, or customers.
Big and Bulky Delivery Capacity
SameDay also expanded into big and bulky deliveries, including holiday orders that were harder to manage before. The team could match each delivery with the right vehicle based on what was being transported.
“We can set up which vehicle goes and what the items are. Before, it was just, this is the order. It didn’t matter if it fit or not.” Andrea said.
Looking Ahead: Getting More From Onfleet
SameDay isn’t done improving its delivery operation. Next, Andrea wants to bring Onfleet’s route optimization into more of the business, particularly its on-demand deliveries. Those routes are less predictable than ShopRite’s scheduled delivery windows, creating more opportunity to optimize how orders are assigned and routed.
She also wants to make better use of GPS data to cross-check vehicle location against order status. That would give the team another way to verify what’s happening in the field.
When asked which Onfleet capabilities matter most to SameDay, Andrea pointed to the visibility she relies on today and the routing capabilities she plans to use next:
“Checking the status of orders,” Andrea said. “And route optimization, which we don’t use yet but I’d like to start.”
Losing Store Contracts to Gig Couriers?
Gig platforms have raised the bar for what shippers expect from delivery. But matching their technology doesn’t mean adopting their delivery model.
With Onfleet, couriers can bring real-time tracking, proof of delivery, customer communications, and a #1-rated driver app to the service they already provide.
Talk to our team or start a free trial to see how Onfleet can help you protect existing contracts and compete for the next one.