The carrier just made its third moves to scale back Sunday delivery this year amid cost-cutting and a dip in demand.
FedEx is starting 2023 with its third cut to Sunday home delivery service in the last year.
The news: According to a memo obtained by Business Insider, FedEx Ground will make further cuts to Sunday residential service in select areas, effective March 19. This follows a move last summer to halt the seventh-day delivery service in primarily rural areas, which accounted for about 15% of its service area, and more cuts in September. The latest move signals FedEx is going deeper.
Where will service end? The locations are not yet finalized, but FedEx indicated it would maintain Sunday service for more than 50% of the U.S. population, with a primary focus on densely populated areas. In particular, it is targeting areas with “proven demand.”
Key quote: “As we continue to adapt and streamline the FedEx global network to meet our customers’ needs in a rapidly shifting landscape, FedEx Ground is making further adjustments to better align our Sunday residential delivery operations with current customer demand,” the company said.
Let's back up. When did FedEx launch Sunday delivery? About four years ago. Originally, the carrier added Sunday delivery during peak season 2019, then extended it to a year-round offering in 2020. It was seen as a competitive advantage over rival UPS, and a bulwark as Amazon expanded its own logistics network. When the pandemic increased ecommerce demand later in 2020, FedEx appeared to be well-positioned.
So why is it cutting back now? There are a trio of factors looming for FedEx:
‘Ecommerce reset.’ That’s what Raj Subramaniam is calling the pullback in demand that the carrier is seeing following the return to in-person activities. On the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call, Subramaniam told analysts that ecommerce has still grown overall since 2019, but is not at the highs of 2020-2021.This is leading to shifts in demand at FedEx.
Cost-cutting: As a result of the demand softening and as a means to reduce inefficiency, FedEx is seeking to cut $3.7 billion in costs this year. Scaling back Sunday service is one way to save money. With two years of data on Sunday delivery now in-hand, FedEx is identifying where the service is getting the most use.
Contractor relations: Sunday delivery was a key issue raised when FedEx Ground contractors pushed for better earnings and treatment amid rising inflation and pressure to make more deliveries. Patton Logistics and Route Consultant founder Spencer Patton called on FedEx to end the service entirely over the summer, according to Supply Chain Dive.
Reset = rethink?
At a time of change, it’s worth considering how delivery is changing as a whole. Here are a couple of areas for brands and retailers to consider:
Precision vs. speed. That’s a key tension point in customer demand we’ve heard among logistics professionals. For a time, the priority was on fast delivery. But now, many customers are prioritizing knowing exactly when a package will arrive, so they can plan for it, Zappos.com Chief Experience Officer Stacey Wagner said at Home Delivery World in September. In The Current’s 2023 predictions roundup, Pitney Bowes Global Ecommerce President Gregg Zegras predicted day definite delivery would be a trend of the year. “The goal of ecommerce sellers should not be to deliver as fast as possible, but to tailor the delivery experience to their customer’s schedule,” Zegras said. In that context, is seven-day service still needed? It's a question worth asking, especially given that many are seeking to preserve margins in the current economic environment.
Time to renegotiate? It remains to be seen how FedEx’s move to scale back Sunday delivery will affect rates. FedEx issued a general rate increase of 6.9% amid inflation. How will it balance scaling back the Sunday service with brands and retailers? Perhaps more importantly, who now has the power?
"Fashion ecommerce is one of the most cumbersome customer experiences that exists," said Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman.
Photo by Daniel G. Wells III, used under a Creative Commons license.
The rise of generative AI is bringing with it a groundswell of interest and concern about how the capability to automatically synthesize information and create something new will change how we work.
Given that AI will sit within the architecture of our digital lives, it’s also worth considering how the technology will introduce new tools for other aspects of life, as well.
For two ecommerce innovators in the apparel space, it’s a time to explore how it will transform shopping. Rent the Runway is set to roll out new AI-powered search capabilities, while Stitch Fix is drawing on a long history with data science and machine learning to personalize the inventory buying process.
Here’s a look at the initiatives underway at each company, and their visions for the future:
Rent the Runway is putting a focus on the customer experience this year as it seeks to retain more subscribers and continue a yearslong push toward profitability.
This is resulting in the introduction of a variety of new initiatives, from the addition of an extra item to all orders to speeding up page load times. Yet as CEO Jennifer Hyman zooms out, she sees change being necessary on an industry-wide level in fashion. Beyond adding new features, AI can play a transformational role.
“I think that fashion ecommerce is one of the most cumbersome customer experiences that exists. You are searching through pages and pages and pages of content to find the items that you like and no one likes doing this,” Hyman told analysts on the company’s earnings call this week. “As an industry that still is selling physical products, AI is going to be -- fashion is going to be a major beneficiary as an industry.”
As a rental service, Rent the Runway has a distinct niche in fashion that lends itself to AI’s advantages, Hyman said. As opposed to a retailer that a consumer may visit a couple of times a year, RTR is used frequently by customers. So Hyman said there are opportunities to turn Rent the Runway into a “utility” by creating a more seamless experience.
This frequent use also provides a “highly unique” dataset, Hyman said. They know what a customer is planning to do based on what they rented. They know whether she liked or disliked an item, and many customers are reviewing 10 items per month. They know her size and how an item fits. This can be put to work in tools that allow customers to ask questions, and find answers.
The first application that combines AI and these advantages will appear in the coming weeks, when Rent the Runway plans to launch a beta of AI-driven search. The tool will allow customers to search for common terms or use cases for an item. So a person will be able to write “Miami vibe,” “‘clambake in Nantucket,” or “tropical motifs,” and receive results about what to wear for such an occasion.
The goal is to help customers sift through the endless aisle, and instantly finds what's right for them.
“I think that across all fashion sites, all over the world, the way that people are searching for product is fairly vanilla, it's fairly functional, right?" Hyman said. "You can go to a site and search for a T-shirt, you can go to a site and search for a black-tie gown. The fact that we're going to be able to enable our customers to search how they actually want to use this closet in the cloud, to search for items to wear to my beach bonfire this weekend, that is a completely different way to search, and I think that it really brings out the value proposition of what a closet in the cloud is all about."
Hyman sees this as a first step in the company using AI models to improve the product experience, and expects more tools to appear in the coming months. RTR is also introducing an SMS concierge experience for onboarding that allows customers to text with a member of the customer service team. The company is already exploring ways that AI can be incorporated into that tool, as well.
In the longer term, Hyman said the company has a vision that will leverage AI to allow customers to communicate with Rent the Runway asynchronously across different modalities, and have a stylist that is constantly available to recommend items, pick out new inventory and answer questions.
“If we are utilizing AI appropriately over the next few years, I see no reason why someone even has to come to our website,” Hyman said.
Stitch Fix has long married AI with human curation to provide outfits on a subscription basis.
“For years, we have utilized capabilities in generative AI, injecting scores and language into our personalization engines and, more recently, automatically generated product descriptions,” CEO Katrina Lake told analysts. “We have also developed and implemented more advanced proprietary tools such as outfit generation and personalized style recommendations that create a unique and exciting experience we believe is unmatched in the market.”
A new area where the company is applying AI is inventory buying.
“We have historically utilized a number of tools to make data-informed decisions with our inventory purchases,” Lake said. “Now, directly leveraging our personalization algorithms, we have developed a new tool that creates an exciting paradigm shift, which will utilize math scores at the client level to drive company-level buying actions. We expect the clarity of demand signals at the individual client level to drive more proactive and efficient inventory decisions as a company. And because of this, we expect to see higher success rates on fixes and drive increases in keep rates and [average order value] over time.”
Early results are promising. When compared with existing buying tools, testing showed a 10% lift in keep rate and AOV. By the end of this quarter, Stitch Fix expects 20% of all purchase orders to be algorithmically informed.
With experience using AI and a team in place to build, Stitch Fix is investing in the technology. Like Rent the Runway, it also has a unique dataset that offers an immediate advantage.
Here are Lake’s thoughts about how Stitch Fix’s AI strategy:
One of the things that I love about our experience is that we have generative AI that's really in more of a visual format. And so, the outfits that we have in our app, those are actually taking into account your preferences, what we know about you, and then in combination with what we know that you own in your closet. And to be able to kind of continue to push that technology and to be able to continue to give people more value in their experience with Stitch Fix, that's a really good example of, I think, a capability that is, firstly, really aligned with our capabilities around data and personalization and really unique to us.
And then I think it's also really compelling because I really think that pushes us as we think about what that addressable market is. I think if we can push outfits to be something that can be an asset to everybody, I think that is a universal thing that people would love to be able to have, is to have access to advice on a daily basis around what to wear and how to wear it.
While these are distinct companies, their plans lead us to a common conclusion: While the talk around generative AI might be new, many technology-forward companies already have assets sitting inside them that can be leveraged to build new tools. Uncover what’s already there, learn about the AI’s capabilities and develop a solution that's right for your organization. Then, talk to customers to determine how to improve it. It might mean commerce looks different, but that’s okay. The point is to create a better experience.
