Analyzing LicketyShip

(Already checked to ensure that Pete doesn’t mind this being available to his students)

First off, a clarification:
“Because it’s more efficient to deliver products across the city than across the country, they can deliver to you the same day you order for about the same price (and sometimes less) than overnight delivery from FedEx!”
While they may be able to ship for the same price (and maybe less) than the _regular_ overnight delivery cost via FedEx, how does it compare to overnight delivery costs for high-volume-shipping companies? I’m assuming lickety-ship doesn’t yet have high enough volume to get the level of discounts that a major e-tailer like Amazon would have

What incentives does Lickety-Ship provide to the retailers that it works with to convince them to integrate their systems? For many retail companies, actually getting a customer into the store is pretty important. Many stores will discount some items significantly as a way of getting people into the store to purchase more expensive items. Lickety-Ship will need to convince these stores that they offer something worth:
A) losing the actually physical customer walking into the store and seeing other cool things being sold by the company
B) the costs of integration
C) the costs associated with packing up the product (or does Lickety-Ship do that part?)
In order to convince retailers that this is a good option, Lickety-Ship needs to have a large-enough customer base to make the process worth-while. In addition, Lickety-Ship needs to cover most of the work of integration, and make the integration process for the retailer as painless as possible. Lickety-Ship needs to realize that they really have two sets of customers: the people who visit their site to purchase products *and* the retailers who end up selling their items through Lickety-Ship. In order to succeed, they need to focus on making *both* of those customers happy.

From the customer’s perspective, I would want to know a number of things before I ordered from someplace like Lickety-Ship:
A) if the item arrives damaged, or incomplete, or has any type of problem, am I going to be dealing with Lickety-Ship or with the original company?
B) how am I going to get charged for this? Is Lickety-Ship going to share any of my personal information with the seller that they have contracted with? Are they going to share my CC number (or email? or other personal information) with that seller?
C) shipping costs are often uncertain. If the actual shipping cost is greater than the estimated, am I going to be charged more? If the actual is less than estimated, will I be refunded the difference?
D) If I order 2 or 3 items, how will that be factored into the shipping cost? Will Lickety-Ship take into account the costs involved in shipping 2 items separately as opposed to shipping them together? Will they work to decrease the cost to me regardless? If they initially think that they can ship the 2 items in one shipment, and it turns out that they can’t, will I be charged more?
E) what happens if I make an order, and there’s a race condition, and the item I ordered is no longer available at that retailer? Will I still get my item the same day? If it ends up costing more to get the item to me, who eats that cost?

These same issues are things that Lickety-Ship needs to pay attention to. A number of the questions that I’m asking as a customer are pushing Lickety-Ship into a position of balancing a focus on the customer against a need to become/remain profitable.

Anyway, that’s my 0.5 cents on this topic. It’s a very interesting one, and I’d be interested in seeing other people’s thoughts as well!

@TuxGirl,

You present many questions, which are relevant, but not the model that I want the students to follow.

What I expect is for students to write a well-formed 1000 word essay, or less, showcasing their knowledge of the 4 performance dimensions and the trade-off’s between them in the context of LicketyShip’s business model. Questions might be part of the essay, but I’m looking for some analysis and responses to the questions above. The students might want to map the process as they know it, given the little data they have and comment on that, etc.

Thanks for your comment; Good questions, too.

Pete:

This looks like a great exercise! I also like the way you seem to be integrating blogging into your class.

Nice Peter. This should be an interesting class with interesting and meaningful case studies. On the other hand is the class just a ploy to draw more traffic to your blog…I mean making it required reading!

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