Lowe's Will Fly Painter's Tape to Your Driveway in 20 Minutes. The Order Belongs to DoorDash.
· CX Pulse
Lowe's flies orders by drone through DoorDash and Costco is now in three delivery apps. The sale stays with the retailer. The doorstep belongs to the app.
Lowe's Will Fly Painter's Tape to Your Driveway in 20 Minutes. The Order Belongs to DoorDash.
Lowe's announced drone delivery on Thursday, live now at its store in Matthews, North Carolina. Wing, Alphabet's drone company, flies the order. It arrives in as fast as 20 minutes. Each flight carries about 2.5 pounds, so the list is hand tools, paint supplies, tape, batteries, soap and cleaner, the things Lowe's own release calls "easily forgotten yet critical to finishing any home improvement task." And you order them in the DoorDash app, from a storefront called "Lowe's by Drone."
Eight days earlier, Costco did a bigger version of the same thing. On September 16 it expanded Uber Eats delivery from 17 states to 47, nearly 600 warehouses. On September 17 it launched on DoorDash from every U.S. warehouse, more than 4,000 products, membership linked inside the app. It has been on Instacart since 2017. A Costco member now has three delivery apps for the same building, and on Thursday the company reported digitally enabled comparable sales up 19.5% for the quarter.
Who owns the doorstep
In both cases the retailer keeps the sale and hands the last mile to a company whose customers are its own. That's a reasonable trade. Lowe's didn't want to build a drone fleet and Costco didn't want to build a courier network for 647 warehouses. But it moves three things out of the retailer's hands, and each of them is where the customer's experience actually gets decided.
The delivery promise. "As fast as 20 minutes" is Lowe's line, but the countdown on the screen is DoorDash's and the flight is Wing's. The substitution. When the warehouse is out of something, the prompt that offers an alternative belongs to the app. The help button. An order placed in DoorDash gets its "where is my order" screen and its refund from DoorDash. The customer's membership is Costco's. The problem is somebody else's.
If you run CX for a large operation
The number to worry about is the share of delivery complaints you never see. When the app handles the miss, credits the customer and closes the case, your CRM records a completed order. A member who gets a bad delivery and a credit from the driver app shows up in your data as a satisfied customer who did not reorder. Three apps means three of those blind spots with three different refund policies, and none of them is obliged to tell you anything.
Three cuts make it visible. Contacts per delivered order, split by channel, with the marketplace's own support volume on the agenda at the partnership review. Repeat order rate within 30 days for customers whose last order came through an app, against customers who came through your own site. And substitution acceptance, because a customer who declined the substitute and got nothing is a stockout you sold. If the marketplace contract has no clause handing you the complaint data, that's the clause to add at renewal.
Lowe's, to its credit, designed the pilot around a moment of failure rather than a basket. Two and a half pounds and a list of forgettable items is a bet that the mid-project store run is the worst part of the whole trip, and the release says so in plain words. That's a narrower promise than "we deliver," and a narrower promise is easier to keep.
If you're the whole company
You have probably been on DoorDash or Uber Eats for years, and you already know the deal: their driver, their refund, your review. What changed this month is that the biggest name in warehouse clubs and the second biggest in home improvement signed the same deal at national scale. When a company doing nearly $94 billion in a quarter decides the app can own the doorstep, the market is saying the trade is acceptable. It doesn't make the trade free.
The one thing worth doing is ordering from yourself through the app, once, and choosing "there's a problem with my order." Read who answers, what they offer, and whether you'd ever hear about it. That's your customer's experience of your business on a bad day, and somebody else wrote it.
The sale is still yours. The doorstep belongs to the app.