Dropoff Client Success Story: Tomlinson’s Feed

dropoff + tomlinson

For more than 70 years, pet owners in Austin, Texas have turned to Tomlinson’s Feed for natural, healthy pet products and trusted guidance on animal nutrition. Dropoff has helped Tomlinson’s forge an even stronger relationship with their customers.

Results

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1,000+ Monthly Deliveries

98% On-Time Performance

5 Out Of 5 Stars

From zero in <8 months For all deliveries to date Average driver rating

The Beginning

Tomlinson’s Feed, a successful local business operated by members of the Click family spanning four generations, is based upon a clear objective: “Do what’s best for our guests and their pets.”

In alignment with this mission to offer the best possible experience to their customers— who increasingly desired more flexibility and convenience — they began looking for an effective way to offer local delivery of their products.

They initially considered undertaking this endeavor by themselves, but quickly realized that successful same-day logistics demands investment in more than just a fleet of delivery vans: It requires powerful software, professional drivers, multi-layered customer support management and a seasoned dispatch team to get things where they need to be in the most efficient way possible.

As a result, in December 2018, Tomlinson’s Feed and Dropoff joined forces.

The Partnership

Tomlinson’s Feed quickly followed with the launch of a brand-new website in January 2019 that allowed their customers for the first time to order products by delivery.

What began without much fanfare with only 16 deliveries placed that month would soon become an extremely popular offering that proved to be a catalyst for skyrocketing business.

That March, Tomlinson’s Feed completed an integration with Dropoff’s API, connecting their new website to our platform and thus allowing their customers to place orders for delivery which are then directly and immediately processed by our operations team.

This integration ended manually-scheduled deliveries by Tomlinson’s Feed employees, which gave them the free capacity to actively drive up utilization of the local delivery option.

Tomlinson’s Feed was able to find a potent competitive advantage by providing free local same-day delivery for all orders above $75, with free delivery as a perk for all automatic-renewal “auto-ship” orders.

This offering in particular has transformed their business, with 45% of all online orders now classified as auto-ship subscriptions. Their resulting order volume ballooned: Tomlinson’s Feed reached almost 500 deliveries in August and more than twice that in subsequent months, leading to a surge in revenue.


“It’s amazing that Dropoff has such excellent drivers in the gig economy, and it really says something about your business.”

— Betsy Black, E-Commerce Coordinator at Tomlinson’s Feed


The Key Success Factors

A chief component of this partnership’s overwhelming success has been the commitment by both parties to upholding those core principles of trust, quality and delight that earned Tomlinson’s Feed such an outstanding reputation in the first place.

As a true partner, Dropoff has been able to provide and hyper-extend the unparalleled experience that has come to define the Tomlinson’s brand. 
According to Betsy Black, Tomlinson’s Director of e-Commerce, the high standard of professionalism exhibited by Dropoff’s drivers has been a huge part of the results we’ve been able to achieve together.


“They’ve really gone the extra mile. We had an elderly customer who ordered a huge cat tree, and the Dropoff driver not only carried it into her 2nd-story apartment, he carried an old one out to a dumpster for her.”

The COVID-19 Challenge

The unprecedented outbreak of the coronavirus in mid-March of 2020 presented an enormous challenge to retail establishments in general, Tomlinson’s Feed included.

As an essential business that supplies pet products, they made the decision to remain open during the crisis. They quickly experienced a major surge in online orders and home delivery volume – their deliveries quadrupled in the span of 4 days.

Fortunately, as a result of Dropoff’s flexible and responsive Operations Team combined with reputable driver fleet and proprietary logistics platform, scaling up to accommodate the increased demand has been a remarkable success.

Betsy’s collaboration with Dropoff’s Operations Team and the City Manager in Austin has led to a seamless increase in delivery volume.


“To be able to have a delivery partner that we’re still able to advertise in the exact same manner that we did pre-pandemic is pretty phenomenal. We would not be able to do same-day delivery right now without Dropoff — they really stepped up to the plate and have been there for us during this crisis.”

— Betsy Black, E-Commerce Coordinator at Tomlinson’s Feed

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