Doddle: Replatforming to take Click & Collect to the customer – Couchbase Connect 2016

Hi. We’re Doddle. We’re the purple parcel people and we’re passionate about all things parcels. We want to change the way people collect or return their online shopping.We know your customers have better things to do than stay in all day waiting for deliveries or stand in never-ending queues at the post office.There’s no reason why the customer experience for click and collect shouldn’t be as good as your usual in-store experience. That’s wherewe come in.

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Industry trends.E-Commerce GROWING Click and Collect GROWING

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 20180

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90

0.0%

2.0%

4.0%

6.0%

8.0%

10.0%

12.0%

14.0%

16.0%

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Ecommerce in the UK

Retail ecommerce sales (£bn)% of total retail sales

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 20180

200

400

600

800

1000

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Total UK to UK volume (millions of orders)

Q2 201

1

Q4 201

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Q2 2012

Q4 201

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Q2 201

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Q4 201

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Q2 201

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Q4 201

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Q2 2015

0.00%

5.00%

10.00%

15.00%

20.00%

25.00%

Average percentage of click and col-lect sales (completed online)

Number of Deliveries GROWING

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Our Network.

We have 70 stores conveniently located across the UK. We’re based in eight out of the ten busiest train stations. All our locations have very high footfallwith over 400 million individual commuter journeys annually. We’re open 7-days-a-week, early till lateto suit our customer’s busy lifestyle. We’re student-friendly with stores onfive university campuses across London, Glasgow, Manchester, Birminghamand Hertfordshire.

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Core service overview.

CollectWe’re a click & collection option at the checkout of many online retailers. When we’re not at the checkout, you can still have any parcel delivered to Doddle.

Select Doddle as your click & collect option and your Doddle store of choice as your delivery address. We’ll get in touch by textor email when it’s ready to be collected.

Not happy with your purchase? We can return shopping to any online retailer.

Simply go to one of our Doddle locations with whatever you need sending back and we’ll do the rest. No added paperwork or extra hassles.

Thrown out the packaging? Our Parcelistas can wrap and pack your return in pretty purple packaging, too.

Return

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Our mobile application.

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Our retail partners.

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Carrier specific model.Some retailers have relationships with Carriers which provide the retailer with access to that carrier’s proprietary PUDO network.

Retailer Carrier Pick-up point

The unique aspect of Doddle’s model is the ability for consumersto order from any ecommerce site and have that parcel delivered into a Doddle store. This results in genuine consolidation of online orders and drives benefits for each of the retailer, carrier and consumer.

Doddle model.

Retailer Carrier Pick-up point

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Supply chain efficiency.

Growing parcel volumes and cheaper or free delivery offers are placing a greater strain on logistics.

Consumers are choosing retailers based on the best collect and return options due to being let downby poor delivery experiences.

Retailers are having to spend more to handle the growing volume of complaints due to delivery issues.

Market challenges:

Doddle guarantees first time delivery with consolidated drops to our stores, reducing a significant cost to the supply chain.

Doddle is developing its own logistics capabilitiesto take full advantage of the value created byour network.

Doddle’s solutions:

100 Home Deliveries PER DAY100 DELIVERY VANS11% FAIL 1ST ATTEMPT

ONE TRIP TO A Doddle STORE100 PARCELS transported100% DELIVERY SUCCESS RATE

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Introducing Doddle, The Leader in a growing market.

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Our customer experienceis unrivalled.We love working with Doddle for many reasons, amongst those we love their collaborative approach, innovative solutions and passionate purple people.

Karl HarwoodHead of DistributionMissguided

The key to any great relationship is trust and from day one, we’ve been confident that Doddle’s commitment to delivering delightful customer experiences means MOO orders are in safe hands.

Dan MorossDirector of Customer Experience MOO

Doddle are easy to deal with, friendly, personal and offer what is arguably one of the best customer service experiencesI have encountered.

Doddle really are a Doddle to deal with, both from a partners pointof view and a customers. 

Ian LangrishOperations DirectorCity Forex/air.money

“So handy”“Beyond helpful”“I could not recommend Doddle more”“Extremely reliable”“Really lovely friendly staff”“Works every time.”

TRUSTPILOT QUOTES.

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Our ambition: To be the world’s leading click & collect company.

Stores Universities Concessions Neighbour Areas

2016 36 5 50 7

2020 60 30 660 250

Why mobile helps…

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Our retail space.

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Open early until late.• Not just staff – systems need to be open for business• Degrade gracefully if we have connectivity problems

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Customer service focus.

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Old system.• Large physical footprint• Expensive• Slow to deploy• Depended on connectivity • Inconsistent performance

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Our mobile store system.

Agile to deployAvailability and reliability

Performance & ease of use

The right locationOpen for businessCustomer service focus

How Couchbase fits…

Doddle core architecture.

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• AWS• Use lots of *aaS• Node.js & Python• We’re adopting Lambda

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Doddle core architecture.

• Event driven architecture• APIs raise events when changes occur• Consumers subscribe to events they care about

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Raising events from Couchbase.

Couchbase Server

Sync

Topic SMS

CUSTOMER

Web

hook

App

• We can’t get events from the mobile app in the same way

• We rely on the Couchbase Server webhooks to raise events

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Selective replication of data & access control

All the dataLiverpool

ONE

LondonStratford

ManchesterPiccadilly Manchester

Grafton Street

London Liverpool

Street

LondonHWH

GraysLondon Road

• Sync Gateway channels solve this problems for us• Users have permissions on one or more channels, allowing them to work in multiple stores

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Overlycomplexdiagram…

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Versioning and conflicts.

• Particularly when a store drops into an offline state, we expect conflicts

• Can happen in the store systems or the backend functions

• Resolution is much easier if:• Append only• Record events

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Document attachments.

• We take a photo of every item passing through the store system for collection

• We use Couchbase’s attachment support• A backend lambda function backs up images to S3

So what’s happened?

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Delivery.

Project concept 9th February 2016

Project started26th April 2016

First store go-live14th July 2016

(Henry Wood House)

156 days =

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Key decision.• The benefits and acceleration we get from Couchbase

outweighs the overhead of feeding and watering the installation

• Now we have it, we can look to exploit other differentiators from DynamoDB

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What’s next?

Thank you.

mark.ransby@doddle.comlinkedin.com/in/markransby@markransby