Local Delivery | Tejas Mehta

3 mo

To V1

Merchant controls, checkout integration, routing app

100k

Merchants

Adopted local delivery within six months

The Pivot

When COVID hit, Shopify's executives sat down for a start/stop/continue discussion across every initiative. Local delivery was a start.

I'd been working on ecosystem products. That stopped. Local delivery was suddenly the higher need.

What is local delivery? Merchants themselves delivering to customers in their local area. Not shipping via carriers—merchants loading up their car and driving orders around town. With stores shut down and shipping networks overwhelmed, this was how commerce could keep moving.

Shopify had shipping as the primary fulfillment concept. Pickup existed but was secondary. Neither had moved forward much. COVID forced us to accelerate the platform work while simultaneously getting functionality into merchants' hands.

The tension was real: build what customers need right now, but don't leave the platform in a state that takes years to repair. We didn't know how long COVID would last. Every decision involved ambiguity about where to take shortcuts and where to invest properly.

What We Built

The product had several layers.

Merchant controls: Merchants needed to define delivery zones—where they'd deliver, what they'd charge, what hours they operated, what their delivery promises were. This was configuration that powered everything downstream.

Checkout integration: The zones fed into checkout. Buyers in a delivery zone saw local delivery as an option with the merchant's pricing and timing.

Routing app: An operational layer for merchants to actually execute deliveries. Orders accumulate until a cutoff—say, noon. Then the merchant batches them, the app suggests optimal routes, they can split across multiple drivers, and staff can track who's delivering what.

V1 was live within three months. Merchant configuration and checkout integration came in the first month. The routing app followed a month or two later. By six months, merchants had the full end-to-end system.

Incremental delivery was key. We didn't wait for everything to be perfect. Merchants got value from zone configuration and checkout integration immediately, even before the routing app existed.

What We Didn't Build

The routing app was less successful long-term. Post-order operations—staffing, driver tracking, local logistics nuance—require more investment than we were willing to make. This is a layer where third-party apps can specialize, investing in local context that a platform company can't.

We built the initial version to get merchants off the ground, then handed that job to the ecosystem.

💡

Know what's platform and what's ecosystem. Merchant configuration and checkout integration are platform—they need to work consistently across all merchants. Driver routing is ecosystem—it needs local nuance that specialized apps can provide better than Shopify.

V2 work included integrations with local delivery networks like Uber—letting merchants offer third-party delivery and pass that cost to buyers. But the core platform work was V1.

What Stuck

Local delivery growth slowed once COVID restrictions lifted. But it persists.

A flower shop uses local delivery to differentiate—fresh bouquets delivered by them, not sitting in a carrier warehouse. A beer company I remember built their whole brand around the delivery experience: creating fanfare when they showed up at your door, because their brand is about joviality.

These businesses took the opportunity COVID forced on them and made it a permanent part of their model. Nobody wanted COVID, but people make lemonade when given lemons.

Local delivery isn't something every merchant uses daily. But this is the game Shopify is in now. Even the tails matter at scale. A "tail" feature that 100k merchants rely on isn't really a tail—it's a meaningful business.

The growth curve flattened, but the merchants who adopted it kept using it. That steady stream of adoption continues today.

Local delivery was a crisis response that became a permanent capability. The lesson: when you build platform infrastructure right—even under pressure—it compounds. The merchants who discovered local delivery during COVID are still using it five years later.