How flexible fulfillment helps Fresh Direct avoid sour customers

In New York City, the nation’s largest metropolis complete with constant congestion, snarled traffic and frequently changing weather, web retailers have to be extremely dexterous at order fulfillment and shipping.

A case in point is Fresh Direct, a regional web grocer. Over the weekend as the remnants of Hurricane Ivan dumped up to six inches of rain and the city prepared to host 90 foreign heads of state at a United Nations summit, Fresh Direct altered its fulfillment program to ensure that orders were shipped in a timely manner.

In addition to putting as many as three delivery employees in each of its 100 trucks, Fresh Direct also has as many as eight additional employees waiting at pre-determined locations to take individual orders off the truck and deliver them on foot.

If an order was to be slightly late, Fresh Direct has its logistics program tied into its customer service program, which results in calls to customers informing them ahead of time of the new expected delivery window.

New Yorkers are notorious for not giving retailers repeat business if they think the merchant has skimped on customer service or failed to deliver an expected order. But a growing percentage of Fresh Direct’s business is from repeat customers in part because the company remains flexible in its approach to fulfillment and delivery.

"We had as many as eight employees taking orders off the truck and delivering them on foot during the Republican national convention," says Fresh Direct CEO Dean Furbush. "New York City is a very unique food market and requires flexibility on our part like it did last weekend."

Fulifillment flexibility and a tight supply chain based on using mostly local and regional suppliers has helped Fresh Direct increase sales by about 125% through the first six months of 2004, the company says.

Fresh Direct, No. 55 in Internet Retailer’sTop 300 Guide to online retailers, has total annual sales of about $125 million.