A concept of crowdsourced delivery for small local shops

Small and medium-sized companies, in particular small local shops, suffer from increased competition via e-commerce channels, e.g. by Amazon and its same day delivery services. Consequently, local shops need delivery options to remain competitive. However, available delivery options such as express delivery are too expensive. A crowd-based delivery platform that leverages free capacity of cars from craftsman and nursing services as well as individuals can be one solution to organize affordable deliveries for small local shops. In this paper, we develop a first version of such a transportation platform within an action research study. Based on the early version of the platform, we discover smart data related challenges that need to be solved to establish the platform successfully. These challenges cover (1) identifying matches between the drivers’ routes and transportation requests within a large data set, (2) governing the different parties participating in the platform ecosystem, (3) incentivizing users to join to overcome the “chicken or egg” problem, (4) establishing trust among platform users, and (5) ensuring privacy of user data. The solutions to these challenges will not only facilitate the implementation of a transportation platform for small local shops, they will also contribute to other platform-based business.