Activities/Businesses type

A bike-delivery coop may engage in these types of business on the platform.

Last Mile

A client who has a product that is brought to your urban center through its own logistics channels (internal or external) and for whom you deliver their products to the final customers in the urban area. These clients may be large national clients such as DHL or UPS, or they may be smaller businesses such as Nescafe or a regional weekly fruit/vegetable box service. The key characteristics of these clients are:

• Large quantities of deliveries on the days in which there are deliveries (25 - 100+)
• Break in client management: clients with an issue will call the package provider, which means they often want high levels of transparency in regards to package status in real time.
• Tension in regards to delivery service quality (they tend to ask for things that are difficult/impossible at the price that they are willing to pay, so many delivery personnel use tricks or shortcuts to fulfill the service that they don’t 100% want the provider to know about)
• Low price per point, simple pricing rules

Local Commerce

Working with a B2B customer as an external delivery service, you invoice him regularly at the end of the month. In CoopCycle, this user is a store owner. The package is usually prepared in the same location as the pickup address, making it unnecessary to have lots of task verification steps at pickup (unlike last mile).

“Foodtech”

Working as an intermediary between restaurants and individual customers who purchase food online on the CoopCycle marketplace. This service means that the cooperative is responsible for the creation and maintenance of the profile of a restaurant on their CoopCycle instance, and usually also manages the customer service, promotions, and incidents related to the service. Many times the cooperative also participates in / is relevant to the marketing and communications strategy of the restaurant. Payments are usually done electronically with Stripe in Northern/Central Europe, but in other locations are done with other payment processing platforms or with cash payments.

Marketplace

Like foodtech, but for non-food products. Currently this part of the platform is effectively unusable due to limitations in regards to how many products can be effectively uploaded onto the CoopCycle instance and modified efficiently afterwards, as well as other issues. In the future, this would be a place where, like foodtech, products from places like bakeries, pet stores, or supermarkets could be directly displayed to a client who would make an order, which would then be packaged by the B2B client collaborator and delivered to the final consumer by the messenger cooperative. At the moment this can be done be using the WooCommerce / Wordpress API integration.