Three years after it was acquired by parcel giant UPS Inc., the crowdsourced delivery platform Roadie today launched a service for “big and bulky” goods, saying the new capability offers efficient, same-day delivery by moving products directly from retailers’ distribution centers via cross-dock facilities.
The service was first launched in metro Atlanta and is now operating in New York, Miami, and Dallas. Facilities in Chicago and Los Angeles are set to open in the coming months and more locations will follow throughout 2024 and 2025.
The new offering, known as RoadieXD (with the final letters standing for "cross dock"), enables pick-up of full truckloads directly from customer distribution centers, which shortens time to delivery and minimizes handling, the Atlanta-based unit said. RoadieXD delivery is currently available for items up to 200 pounds and up to 12 feet in length, including pallets.
According to Roadie, that design makes the service particularly useful for the items traditional carriers refer to as “irregulars,” which are big, bulky, oversized or oddly-shaped deliveries. Historically, big and bulky items have been costly and complex for traditional carriers to deliver and are thus expensive for the retailer to send; in fact, many of them are not boxed and are outside of traditional carriers’ tariffs. But with this model, retailers can offer same-day delivery across a wide range of SKUs with minimal cost and complexity, up to 100 miles from cross-dock facilities located around the U.S.
“RoadieXD enables retailers to deliver the big screen TV their customers ordered anywhere, even over the threshold in some markets, as quickly as the same day,” Marc Gorlin, Roadie’s founder and CEO, said in a release. “Or their mini-fridge, or their barbecue grill, or a 50-pound bag of dog food. With our new cross-docking solution, all of that becomes easy.”
