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Drone Delivery: By The Numbers

Posted by Colin Snow on October 2, 2014 at 10:28pm

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This post looks at the top line results of the poll I did on drone delivery service - how much would you pay?

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What do medicine, batteries, and forgotten anniversary gifts have in common?  They are the most likely items consumers will want delivered by drone once that service is available.  At least, that’s the verdict from the consumers I surveyed in August and September of this year. In my post Drone Delivery: How Much Would You Pay?, I ran a poll with three simple questions:

  1. What’s the maximum amount you would be willing to pay for a package delivered by drone?
  2. Which of ten items would you want delivered in 30 minutes?
  3. Under what circumstance would you need something so quickly that you’d pay top dollar for it?

These are the top line results.  Read more here: http://droneanalyst.com/2014/10/02/drone-delivery-numbers/

You can see the companion summary presentation with more complete graphs and charts of the data here: http://www.slideshare.net/ColinSnow/drone-delivery-bythenumbers

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Comments

  • BayAreaCrasher October 3, 2014 at 1:20pm

    @Toby....that would be interesting.  Like fruit flies off a dirty truck.

  • Toby Mills October 3, 2014 at 12:10pm
    As with most services, it's the last mile that is the most expensive. You can't really bring the people to the distribution center but you can bring the distribution center to the people (almost).

    Long hauling bulk goods is cheap but individual deliveries to addresses is expensive.

    The solution is to bulk load and long haul, then stop the long haul truck as it passes through each city and have the drones deliver from the truck. When the last drone returns, drive to the next city and repeat, charging the drones on the way.

    Amazon, if you use this idea I want a check ;)
  • Colin Snow October 3, 2014 at 8:23am

    Thanks Jethro and Greg.  @Greg - This wasn't a true research study - more a quick poll. I got less than 200 respondents (most came in via Twitter) and I didn't ask demographic questions, so no distribution break down.

     

    As a follow up I looked at another camera example.  The current Amazon best seller is the Nikon COOLPIX L830.  It lists for US $197.  Package weight is 1.1 lbs.  A 20% delivery charge would be $39 and 30% would be $59.  If ordered from a NY camera house the next day delivery charges from NY to CA would be the same as the Sony camera - $34.  If drone delivery comes at a premium, then it seems to me the charge would be more than 30% of this item.

  • Jethro Hazelhurst October 3, 2014 at 2:19am

    As usual... an awesome read!

  • Greg Dronsky October 3, 2014 at 2:02am

    Hi Colin, great work! Can you tell us what was the test group? How many people, and what was the distribution of age/occupancy? Or at least which sites on web did you show your survey on?

This reply was deleted.