What is a Dark Store?
A dark store is a fulfillment center that caters to online orders placed by customers. It has the inventory but customers are not required to visit the dark stores. When a customer places an order, the staff at the dark store packs it and delivers it to the customer’s doorstep. There was a surge in the number of dark stores during the pandemic.
What are the benefits of a dark store?
Dark stores offer multiple benefits like:
- Faster Delivery: Businesses are able to offer faster delivery options like same-day delivery or delivery within one hour by bringing the fulfillment center closer to the customer.
- Contactless shopping: Dark stores enable social distancing as the customers don’t need to physically visit the dark store to make the purchase.
- Broadens the reach: Retailers who were earlier dependent on customers coming to their store can now serve a larger audience via their online store and fulfill the order by delivery.
- Better inventory control: Dark stores can also serve as mini-warehouses for retail stores and fulfill their demand as needed.
- Larger range of products: As dark stores are customer-free, it gives them more storage space to keep a variety of products.
How does Zeo Route Planner help with faster deliveries?
Zeo Route Planner is easy to use and helps you create optimized routes within seconds. It allows you to add details like delivery time slot, stop priority, stop duration, customer details, and any specific customer notes. It saves the time spent on the road so that more time is spent on revenue-generating activities.
Route optimization also results in lesser operational costs and improves the profitability of your business.
Hop on a 30-minute demo call to find out how Zeo can be the perfect route planner for your business!
