The dual engine of delivery: designing smarter online grocery operations
Profitability in online grocery often shifts with customer expectations and the realities of last-mile delivery. Many factors influence delivery performance, but two metrics consistently shape how cost and capacity behave in practice: Drops Per Car (DPC) and Stops Per On-Road Hour (SPORH). Together, they make it easier to see where the system is working well and where small adjustments can deliver meaningful gains.
Drops Per Car: using each vehicle more effectively
Drops Per Car, or DPC, measures how many orders a vehicle delivers before returning to the fulfillment center. It’s simple, but it tells you a lot about cost per order. When DPC rises, fixed costs suddenly stretch further because each run supports more deliveries.
What shapes DPC
A vehicle’s capacity depends on whether space or weight becomes the limiting factor, which is largely shaped by the design of your delivery packaging, whether that may be styrofoam or cardboard boxes, or plastic or paper bags. Thin, volume-efficient packaging allows groceries to be packed more densely, meaning weight often becomes the constraint. When that happens, lighter materials help increase the number of orders each vehicle can carry. Even modest adjustments can have a noticeable effect at scale.
Increasing DPC by only a few stops per run can have a significant effect on how far fixed costs stretch. In a low-margin business like online grocery, moving from 30 to 33 drops per run may sound small, but across a fleet it will significantly change the cost per order.
Stops Per On-Road Hour: understanding real on-road efficiency
Stops per on-road hour, or SPORH, tracks how many deliveries a driver completes for every hour spent on the road, from the time the driver is finished loading the van and starts the route until they return to the depot. It reflects true productivity at the point where most of your variable costs live. When driver wages are time-based, SPORH becomes one of the clearest indicators of performance.
How SPORH improves
Higher customer density naturally lifts SPORH because drivers travel shorter distances between stops. Smarter routing can strengthen this further by trimming unnecessary travel time. Small gains here add up quickly over a full shift.
What happens inside the fulfillment center also matters. Fast loading gives drivers more time where it matters most, namely, out on the road delivering to customers. Even small operational details, like delivery packaging that is quicker to unload adds up across dozens of stops.
Customer delivery time slots create a meaningful balancing act. Narrow windows are convenient for customers, but they then limit routing options, which often reduces both SPORH and DPC. Wider windows create room for efficiency and usually produce denser routes. The challenge is to find the structure that delivers a reliable customer promise without constraining the operation more than necessary.
Distribution points: expanding with flexibility
Expansion often prompts discussions about building new fulfillment centers. Distribution points offer a more flexible way to grow while avoiding the cost of a full facility.
Night-time line-haul trucks driving from a central site to distribution points avoid heavy traffic. Last-mile vans can then start their day closer to customers, which increases the portion of the shift spent on productive driving and reduces congestion-related delays.
Distribution points also make it easier to test new delivery areas or serve smaller catchments. They allow you to expand geographically without having to invest in building a new fulfillment center. When fulfillment centers and distribution points operate within one integrated planning system, the network becomes significantly more adaptable, allowing vehicles to serve overlapping areas in whichever pattern makes sense that day.
Efficiency and customer experience rise together
It’s easy to imagine efficiency and customer experience in tension with each other, but in practice they depend on the same underlying structure. Systems that flow well are the same systems that deliver on time and meet customer expectations consistently.
Metrics like DPC and SPORH help reveal where that flow is strong and where it could be supported better. They draw attention to the interconnected choices that shape the cost and quality of delivery, from packaging and routing to loading processes and time-slot strategy.
Profitability in online grocery won’t be achieved by focusing solely on tightening the customer experience. Instead, the focus should be on understanding how your system behaves and designing conditions that allow good decisions to happen naturally throughout the day. Get the system right, and both efficiency and customer satisfaction improve in tandem.