Local Delivery ‑ LionWheel

We use many apps across our daily operations, and the LW team stands out among all of them for their exceptional onboarding and support. Their service is truly one of a kind.

LW fulfills all our operational needs when it comes to managing deliveries and has significantly improved our operational efficiency.

The very first app in my shop that truly works amazingly. From the integration with the delivery provider, to the UI/UX and the product itself, all the way to customer service and support — everything just works.

These guys operate like a real tech company, which, in my experience, is pretty rare.

10/10

I am going to break down my review into some detailed sections as I feel many ecommerce businesses who deliver locally will have the same issues I have with logistics and it is important to me that my review covers that this app can help people who deliver locally, either with one vehicle, two or three. It can also work very well for those who need to separate local deliveries from deliveries they ship via courier, AND those who can only have a limited volume of product on their local delivery vehicles.

BACKGROUND
I run a firewood business in Scotland. We currently have 2 delivery vehicles but are expanding to 3. We deliver products in our local area ourselves.
Each vehicle can hold 3 deliveries and delivers 12 items per day - so 4 separate routes are created for each vehicle.

We also ship nationally, these orders are not included in our local deliveries and are dealt with separately by a courier company.

THE PROBLEM I NEEDED SOLVED

For 2 years I have been using Shopify to receive local delivery orders via a calendar selection app, thereafter I have had 24 deliveries per day, with 2 vehicles to plan each delivery for.

I was using google maps and postcodes to manually place each delivery into a drivers slot and then had to copy and paste all details into a separate sheet for the driver to have their route.

We can only deliver 3 firewood orders per vehicle and have 2 sites to collect from which made things quite tricky and EXTREMELY time consuming to plan.

Once I had constructed the routes I had to print off sheets and take to the vehicles, this was always completed after 8pm once the drivers had finished and the routes had been planned, sometimes the vans were at different farms which added to the time and effort for me to get the next days deliveries to the drivers. I start work around 0630 and there is always things to do so having to disappear to another location at 8pm when most others are watching Clarksons Farm and chilling with a Rich Tea Biscuit and a Tetleys was not ideal. Throw into the mix a one year old who has not figured out that nighttime is sleep time then you can imagine the fatigue that these long hours accumulate....

But I digress..., on delivery day, the drivers used my printed sheet and were then responsible for adding these deliveries to google maps (and another app I cant recommend enough "delm8" which takes you to remote properties where postcodes are not enough).

This whole process was hugely time consuming for both myself and the drivers, and the chance for error delivering the correct product was larger due to manually copying and pasting each delivery, I always rushed this as there is so much to do.

This resulted in human error copying items over to the sheet every few days (my bad). Another issue was that once the route was planned, quite often we would have another delivery come through that made logistical sense to add to the next days deliveries, this would mean i would pretty much have to reshuffle most of the deliveries to fit in - again - hugely time consuming.

THE SOLUTION - LIONWHEEL
After a lot of research, and having downloaded and tried MUILTIPLE apps proposing to be the solution I found Lionswheel.

To be totally honest when I first found the app I thought it was too complex and did not suit our products. Local deliveries and national deliveries were merged into the same date with no apparent way to separate - the routes also showed all 24 deliveries in one long line - which would be great if your van could deliver all 20 at once, but we cant, we needed this split to two vehicles and 8 routes.

I decided to reach out to customer support and was connected to Noa.

I explained what I needed through the chat app - which was - to only pull the local deliveries from shopify (which we set up using shopify local deliveries using postcodes) and that we required two vehicles (now three) and the routes to be split.

We also required that the start and end point of each route could be selected depending on what farm our firewood was located at.

THE SOLUTION
Wow... Firstly I had a phonecall with Noa who understood exactly what we required very quickly, she managed to action a lot of changes whilst on the call, already this meant that I could plan my route much faster manually.

She spoke to her development team and within about 3 days EVERY problem I had addressed was fixed, I now have an app that I can select multiple routes each day, for each vehicle and click a button and it optimeses the route for me. If I add a new delivery into the mix? Click a button, it sorts it straight away!

My national deliveries are filtered out so I dont see them on the Lionswheel app, this helps massively as well.

DRIVERS APP
The drivers now have an app that instead of me printing off forms and them manually entering addresses etc they simply open their route, click the delivery they need and it has all the details there for them. No chance of my fatigued fingers forgetting to add firestarters to an order - the app does it all for me / them!

If you are a bit of a neanderthal like myself and are not au fait with technology then the app can appear very complex. If you need something that is not "out of the box" then also don't be put off as they are EXTREMELY HELPFUL and will make a solution work for you, which will save you so much time and if you employ someone to plan logistics, money too as this will speed things up a great deal.

I did have to upgrade to a 99$ plan for this, however it will save me so many hours over the years I have zero issue with this as it is worth every penny.

Kudos to the developer and also Kudos to Noa, who understood my requirements immediately and was on the ball with fixing it in a polite and helpful manner.

Thank you so much and i hope this app solves many of your issues like it has mine.