If you can’t match Amazon on selection or Walmart on price, the easiest place to create advantage is delivery. Chewy’s COO, Scott Anderson, lays out three operational priorities retailers can act on now to make last‑mile shipping a deliberate brand touchpoint rather than a cost center.
1) Treat delivery as part of the product experience
Anderson frames delivery as one of the few defensible experience levers specialty retailers can own. Beyond basic on‑time performance, carriers can provide features that extend the brand: photographic proof of delivery, adjustable delivery windows and the ability for customers to contact drivers directly.
Packing and presentation matter too. The box, inner packaging and unboxing feel are part of the curated experience that helps smaller retailers differentiate from large marketplaces. Anderson’s concrete advice: ask carriers and contract partners explicitly for the service features and handling standards you want — don’t assume standard parcel service will deliver a branded experience.
2) Combine metrics with direct customer signals
Aggregate KPIs show trends; customer anecdotes reveal where processes break down. Drawing on his Amazon experience, Anderson warns that when individual complaints contradict your headline metrics, those anecdotes often point to localized or recurring failures that numbers can hide.
Set a process to capture, triage and resolve delivery complaints quickly. Fixing single‑customer pain points prevents repeat failures and protects lifetime value: shoppers won’t keep giving second chances after the same issue recurs.
3) Be operationally specific with carrier partners
Don’t treat carriers as a pure cost line-item. Anderson recommends operational collaboration: share the customer experience you need, explain service constraints, and co‑design solutions rather than pushing only on price. A race to the bottom on unit cost often delivers worse outcomes for shoppers, shippers and carriers.
That doesn’t mean one carrier fits every route. Many e‑commerce teams converge on a small carrier mix for simplicity, but regional carriers can outperform national networks in rural and very rural areas. Chewy uses FedEx, the U.S. Postal Service and OnTrac, according to the company website — a reminder that mixing national and regional carriers is a valid tradeoff between complexity and local service.
What to do now
Three practical first steps for product, CX and operations teams: 1) audit contracts and SLAs to confirm carriers can provide the delivery features customers expect; 2) implement a complaint‑to‑fix workflow that elevates individual delivery failures into corrective actions; 3) schedule operational reviews with primary and regional carriers to map where localized service gains justify added complexity.
These moves convert delivery from a commodity cost into a predictable brand interaction and help specialty retailers keep pace with consumer expectations shaped by larger platforms.
Signals to watch
Expect more carrier pilots of feature‑level services — targeted delivery windows, enhanced proof packages and driver communication tools. Watch whether those pilots prioritize network simplicity or localized service wins for higher‑value segments; that tradeoff will determine how much operational complexity retailers should accept to win the last mile.
