Snappy Shopper is saving Scottish High Streets one delivery at a time

All is not lost, however. According to accountants PWC, who are noted for publishing a whole range of business reports and surveys, 38 stores closed across Great Britain, on average, every day through 2024.

Terrible as that sounds, there was also good news. The figures also show that 25 new stores opened every day, keeping the loss down to an average of 12 stores closing per day. Not great, but better than it could have been.

According to PwC the types of shops showing net growth include convenience stores, coffee shops and value retailers.

One business that is determined to help at least two of the above, namely convenience stores and value retailers, survive and thrive, is Snappy Shopper, which now counts hundreds of these stores, up and down the country, as customers.

Snappy Shopper’s founder, Mike Callachan says that his approach is aimed to save the High Street. Snappy Shopper provides small shops and convenience stores with both their own website and app with the ability to do home deliveries to local customers.

“The massive difference from the customer’s perspective is that stores on our platform aim to do local deliveries within 30 minutes, and often within 20 minutes,” Callachan says. By way of contrast, the big supermarkets which do home deliveries, are pushed to do next day delivery slots.

He points out that Justin King, the former CEO of Sainsbury, who sits on the Snappy Shopper board, made the point to him recently that there is nothing new at all in the idea of local shops doing home deliveries.

“I knew what he was saying immediately. When my father was a lad, every corner shop had a bicycle with a basket on the front, propped up against the wall. They would think nothing of biking an order around to a customer a few minutes after they called,” he notes.

Callachan argues that there is also a big difference between the home deliveries that Snappy Shopper enables and the deliveries by anonymous carriers from companies such as Deliveroo.

“Those delivery folks are part of the gig economy. You can get a different delivery rider or driver each and every time you order. That’s just not the way it works with us.

“The point is that with Snappy Shopper, the owner of the convenience store is responsible for the deliveries. They’ll be using the same person over and over. This will either be themselves, a member of their family or staff, or a young person they have hired to do the deliveries on a regular basis. This sense of familiarity is a great comfort to customers, many of whom would be uneasy about taking deliveries from a stranger in the evening or at weekends,” he notes.

Getting online with Snappy Shopper as a retailer is relatively simple, but Callachan says that given the large number of stores they have already signed up, they are focusing on those community retailers who really stand out, and who are well known to their local communities.

“There are a lot of small convenience stores that stock mostly tobacco, alcohol and newspapers. That is not really our primary market. We’re looking for stores that local people turn to first when they are out of a couple, or a handful, of items, such as milk, bread, breakfast cereal and so on. Ideally, we want stores that have a good range of products. When we sign up stores that meet these criteria, it makes for a fantastic local delivery experience for customers,” he explains.

The idea for Snappy Shopper came from a chance conversation with a question, “could your apps be used in a convenience store?”. With a first class degree in computer science from St Andrews University, he started doing websites and e-commerce transaction work for large companies back in 2005. His early customers included Brew Dog and Scottish Water.

“For two decades, this was my core business. Then, around 2017 we started with the idea of using an app approach to enable people to place orders with local stores. I saw it as a way of helping the High Street to regain its vibrancy.

“People are always running out of simple items, such as bread and milk, and they turn to their local corner shops and small convenience stores to meet these needs. If we could find a way for the owners to list their products and for consumers to find them on the app and place orders for really short term, 20 – 30 minute fulfilment, we felt there would be a real demand.”

They built the app and began to market it in a low-key fashion first in Scotland. As Callachan explains, Snappy Shopper really took off when The Scotmid Co-op signed up with 250 stores.

“That was a huge deal for us. Then, in March 2020 the world changed dramatically with the Covid lockdown and everyone wanted the service. Things really boomed then, but the dilemma for us was to decide if this was merely a Covid phenomenon or if it would continue strongly once things went back to normal. However, we were confident that it was a movement that would happen regardless of Covid. This is indeed what is happening, and we are looking at a very big market indeed.”

The Covid boom convinced Callachan that he needed some serious expertise on his Board. “It was a really long shot to see if we could get Justin King interested. His experience in the grocery business is huge for us.

Today, Snappy Shopper is very strong in Scotland and Wales with a presence in Northern Ireland and Ireland, but still has limited coverage in England. “We want to roll Snappy Shopper out across the whole of the English market through 2025.

"Currently, we are doing around £175 million a year in terms of transactions placed on the platform. However, that could easily pass the £1 billion mark if we do a good job of continuing to expand across England. In the process, we are hoping to save a lot of High Streets along the way!

He points out that if you ask retailers of any size if their organisation could survive if they lost one in four of their shoppers, the answer would generally be no. Costs are higher than they have ever been, and retail businesses on the High Street are under tremendous pressure.

“No one wants to lose a local High Street, but we are sleepwalking towards that outcome. Boosting the sales of corner shops and convenience stores can really help to turn the tide. We have fantastic shops, with some of them doing in excess of £10,000 a week in orders placed on the app and delivered to customers within half an hour.

"That is money those shops would probably not be getting, or not at that level, without the app. We are in a race against time before everything vanishes to out-of-town supermarkets. This is important,” he concludes.

www.snappyshopper.co.uk