A click and collect service for online retailers and their customers.
Business overview
Location | Windsor, United Kingdom |
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Social media | |
Website | www.cornerdrop.com |
Sectors | Automotive & Transport Mixed Digital/Non-Digital Mixed B2B/B2C |
Company number | 8822345 |
Incorporation date | 20 Dec 2013 |
Idea
Introduction
Did you know that almost one in eight parcel deliveries despatched by UK carriers are missed every day? That’s over 100 million parcels a year.
Click and Collect seems the ideal solution, where you get your parcels delivered to your local shop. But why can’t you get any parcel from any website delivered to a location of your choice? It could be your local corner shop, of course, but why not a dry cleaners, your hairdresser, your gym, a school, a nursery or even a coffee shop?
CornerDrop provides a click and collect service that could be used by all online retailers, enabling their customers to collect parcels from a local drop point early ‘til late, 7 days a week. No more letterbox cards, lost Saturdays or lunchtime queues. We’re delivering flexibility and convenience.
Here's how it works: It’s simple, you place your online order and use the unique security code and delivery address. The parcel is shipped to the CornerDrop location. Show your full security code to the member of staff, receive your parcel.

Intended impact
We want to provide consumers with a convenient way to receive their online purchases. Our mission is to make sure that consumers do not need to wait in for deliveries and can collect locally at their convenience. Last Christmas (2013) shoppers were expected to spend an average of 142 minutes each waiting at home for deliveries to arrive, costing the UK economy £868 million, according to an independent study released by Collect Plus.
CornerDrop has 3 key target audiences:
1. Online Retailers: CornerDrop offers Internet retailers a simple ‘Click and Collect’ service that enhances the customer experience and helps boost online sales. CornerDrop allows any online retailer, regardless of their current fulfilment solution or size, to offer a ‘Click and Collect’ service for their products, by way of a simple plug in or integration into their e-commerce platform.
2. Collection Points: CornerDrop offers local stores a simple new parcel service designed to increase footfall, sales and profitability. It gives customers another good reason to visit their store. We are targeting local venues that are open long hours (7 days per week, 8am ‘til late).
3. Consumers: CornerDrop provides a simple and convenient way for shoppers to collect online parcels at a time that suits them.
Why CornerDrop?
- Simple: Simple method to receive parcels and simple plug-in which enhances the customer’s online shopping experience.
- Local convenience: Choice and convenience for both retailers and their customers.
- Flexible: Order from any online store and deliver to any of our network of local stores.
- Our community: We aim to make CornerDrop a community-driven service. Members will be able to recruit local shops to the CornerDrop network and refer family and friends in return for ‘payback’ which initially will be promotional codes for free use of the service.

Substantial accomplishments to date
We have over 500 stores signed-up and we plan to launch with a network of 2,000 locations in time for the Christmas market. We’re developing a simple plug-in for online retailers to use our Click and Collect service and we’re also creating a consumer website allowing our service to be used by anyone on any website. In the future we plan to add a Return and Send service.
We are currently working on building a relationship with Magento, and we hope that our plug-in will be available for their platform in time for Christmas 2014.
Key dates:
• Jan 2014: accepted as a member of the VC sponsored Accelerator Academy
• March 2014: Top twenty finalist in the Worth Foundation Fund competition
• March 2014: Agreement, in principle, by a major high street chain for 436 stores to join the CornerDrop network for launch. Combined with 70 local corner shops already registered we have a UK-wide network of over 500 locations
• March 2014: A scalable back-end process was developed, producing APIs that can be integrated into shopping platforms

Monetisation strategy
Revenue will be generated in two ways: a consumer product and a trade product.
Consumer Website
(a) Consumers can purchase a relevant code directly for themselves. The code and the delivery address can then be placed into the alternative delivery address section of any website.
(b) The retail cost is £2.00 per code (or delivery item) including VAT.
Trade sales
(a) Extensions will be developed using our APIs that will allow the CornerDrop codes to be generated within the shopping basket process itself. This will enable a significantly more streamlined process.
(b) There will be no charge for the extension itself, but codes will have to be purchased in advance, the sales value depending upon the quantity purchased (between £1.17 and £1.50 + VAT).
(c) We hope that the first extension will be developed for the Magento Community Edition eCommerce shopping platform. This is one of the most popular platform in the UK and will allow us to attract on-line retailers from launch.
(d) The extensions will be marketed through the relevant shopping platform(s) own extension marketing sites (in the case of Magento an area called Magento Connect should a successful relationship develop).
CornerDrop Payments
The CornerDrops would be paid £0.50 per parcel handled, monthly in arrears.

Use of proceeds
CornerDrop is looking for £60,000 of seed funding. This will be used as follows:
• Construct the first plug-in for the Magento Community eCommerce platform
• Create and launch the consumer website
• Develop the branding for all customer touch points
• Produce point-of-sale material for all the launch sites
• Support the ‘community-based’, PR and social marketing plans
• Assist with operational running costs
Market
Target market
CornerDrop has 3 key target audiences:
1. Online Retailers: The initial target for CornerDrop is UK-based Magento ecommerce customers. Magento is one of the largest e-commerce platforms, with 9,500 UK customers. Once we have proof of concept with a number of these online stores we hope to expand and develop plug-ins for other e-commerce platforms such as Open Cart (nearly 7,500 on-line shops), Zen Cart (more than 5,000 eCommerce stores), WooCommerce (close to 4,000 on-line stores) and osCommerce (nearly 3,500 eCommerce shops).
2. Collection Points: We are targeting local venues that are open long hours (7 days per week, 8am ‘til late). The types of locations we are targeting are: dry cleaners, hairdressers, gyms, schools, nurseries, coffee shops, off licenses & petrol stations.
3. Consumers: We aim to convert online shoppers into Click and Collect shoppers. We will be targeting shoppers of the online retailers that take the CornerDrop service, as well as consumers that register directly on our own website for an ‘alternative delivery address’. Click & Collect Market 2013 Report by Verdict Retail suggests that middle-aged affluent females aged 25-44 are most likely to use Click and Collect services.
Sectors:
The Verdict Retail research also indicates that the following sectors will be most used for Click and Collect:
• Clothing and Footwear: Accounts for 23% of online shoppers that have used Click and Collect
• Electricals: 15% of online shoppers that have used Click and Collect
Characteristics of target market
The missed-delivery problem costs money as well as infuriates customers. In the UK 12% of deliveries fail first time, costing the industry an estimated £1bn in re-deliveries. This has caused logistics companies to focus more on improving the delivery experience, from defined time-slots, to text-based messages and the establishment of parcel shops.
The value of the Click and Collect channel is set to grow by 63% from 2013 – 2018 (10.2% each year CAGR) and is expected to be a £4bn market in the UK by 2018. As home deliveries are predicted to peak in 2015, Click and Collect is generally viewed as the future of delivery fulfilment.
As far as we are aware, logistics companies are only offering a parcel collection service if online retailers contract to use their own services. This is likely to only attract Tier 1 (sales exceeding £500m pa) and Tier 2 (sales £30M - £500M pa) retailers. SME online retailers have constrained budgets and as far as we are aware there is currently no ‘generic’ Click and Collect service available for them to compete.
Marketing strategy
The main focus of the marketing strategy is ‘Everything Different’. We are a challenger brand and we need to create cut-through and brand share of voice in a competitive and growing market. The strategy will focus on 3 key areas:
• Growing the number of collection points:
o We have a target list of locations & shops open 24/7 or 8 ‘til late. We plan to focus on organisations that have 'chains' so we can scale and establish a collection point network quickly.
o Uniquely, we believe, we will also enable consumers to recruit their local shops via our community-based, crowd-sourced marketing initiatives.
• Recruiting retailers: we will focus on targeting Magento ecommerce platform retailers initially. As soon as the plug-in is available we hope to get 2-3 retailers on board to create a proof of concept. We aim to recruit other retailers via the Magento partner programme and targeted lead generation.
• Driving consumer awareness: We will drive consumer awareness through PR, social, digital and affiliate marketing. We also expect to increase consumer awareness by promoting viral ‘refer a friend’ behaviours. Additionally, we will engage with our 'partners’ customers (retailers and collection points) by executing co-marketing activities that targets their databases.
Competition strategy
Current competitors in the market: Collect+, myHermes, UPS (Access Point), ByBox and InPost. However, from our understanding, these are only targeting Tier 1 retailers. CornerDrop aims to target the growing Tier 2-3 online retailers including small eBay sellers.
The primary competitor is Collect+ which has 5,500+ Stores (collection points) and 260+ Clients (retailers). We believe that CornerDrop has a number of unique elements that places it at an advantage over its competitors.
Simplicity - Easy registration and simple management of receipt of parcels. Minimal training required for staff to effectively manage the process.
No technology onsite - This means that CornerDrop recruitment is not restricted to the capital outlays required by competitors.
Consumer registration of CornerDrops - If there is no CornerDrop location convenient for the customer, we make it easy and rewarding for the customer to simply recruit their local store.
Fulfilment independent - CornerDrop does not have any vehicles. Therefore, it is attractive to on-line retailers as they need not change any current fulfilment agreements or processes to offer a click and collect service.
Green - By guaranteeing that a parcel will be dropped off and accepted makes the process extremely efficient. Almost one in eight deliveries to customers homes are a wasted journey, not to mention the wasted time and fuel to go and collect the failed delivery from a local depot that could be several miles away.
Consumer driven - Our marketing strategy is to empower the customer to take control of their own deliveries. They can use any delivery service and any website they wish and CornerDrop will accept their parcels. This puts the power of fulfilment back into the consumers hands.

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