How E-BOTEN.DE’s Electric Microcars Provide Sustainable Same-Day Delivery
Necessity is the mother of invention
In 2020, COVID-19 created an instant problem for Caner Polat and his pharmacist brother Gence. Patients were afraid to visit pharmacies to pick up their prescriptions, and the home delivery options for pharmaceutical products in Germany were at best unreliable and at worst unavailable.
Spurred on by a desire to help their patients, the brothers realized they would need to dispense and deliver prescriptions themselves to reliably provide people with the medicine they needed.
They started by downloading Circuit Route Planner, scanning all the deliveries at their pharmacy, and creating a route. Just like that, they set out to attempt their first delivery route. Soon, they began adding more pharmacies to their daily workload, arriving at each, scanning in their patient orders, and navigating around Cologne to deliver them.
What had started as a necessity was beginning to gain momentum, and this gave the brothers the confidence to think bigger. For a while, local pharmacies in Germany had been closing at an alarming rate because of unreliable local delivery and the ease of ordering prescriptions online.
They thought, "What if E-BOTEN.DE could turn this trend around by offering a better delivery service?"
“Last-mile delivery is all about time. We don't have much of it, so everything has to work fast, fast, fast”Purpose-built for the last mile
As their business snowballed, they needed to look for a software solution that would work at scale. So, they moved away from Circuit Route Planner for individual drivers in favor of using a pharmacy-specific delivery tool designed for larger teams.
It didn’t take long for problems to arise. The software was too complicated and full of unnecessary features. It also didn’t provide the flexibility E-BOTEN.DE needed in order to give their drivers control over their routes.
Each pharmacy created its own routes, which regularly caused problems. When drivers arrived at a pharmacy to collect their packages, it was common for them to find extra deliveries not included on the original route. These extra stops couldn’t be added to the route, so drivers had to use Google Maps to find a convenient place to detour away from the fixed route in order to make those deliveries.
Frustrated by these usability limitations, they looked for a better solution and found Circuit for Teams. Purpose-built for last-mile delivery, it put the power back in the Drivers’ hands, allowing them to manage their own routes and handle last-minute changes swiftly.
“Circuit gives the driver a lot more permissions. For example, adding routes, changing addresses, taking proof of delivery photos when they have to deliver to a neighbor“
Same-day delivery that saves CO2
Word of mouth about E-BOTEN.DE’s fast and reliable delivery service has spread like wildfire. From their early days as a two-man team, they now operate in nine cities across Germany, delivering essential medicine to over 7,000 pharmacies.
As an eco-conscious company, they pride themselves on only using digital delivery tools (you won’t find any pen and paper here!). Their delivery fleet is exclusively made up of electric microcars. These have been deliberately chosen to help reduce inner-city emissions. They’re ideal for finding parking in urban areas, and drugs can be securely locked and left in the vehicle when the driver is carrying out deliveries. The E-BOTEN.DE little blue cars with their distinctive branding can’t be missed.
“The cars are also a marketing tool for us. When you see them, you know the pharmacy is coming”Using Circuit for Teams and their electric fleet, they save 144 tons of CO2 every year. They can offer same-day delivery in as little as 45 minutes in cities including Cologne, Düsseldorf, Munich, Garbsen, Hanover, Essen, Solingen, Leverkusen, and Gelsenkirchen.
E-BOTEN.DE has successfully combined patient care with technology to create a market-leading pharmaceutical delivery service that reassures recipients and leaves no carbon footprint. As they continue to grow, their ethos remains the same: to professionalize last-mile pharmaceutical delivery for the end customer so that elderly or vulnerable people who are unable to leave their homes don’t have to wait a long time and can have confidence that their medicine will arrive.
“Our aim for the future is for E-BOTEN.DE to become synonymous with pharmacists as Germany's most efficient and sustainable pharmaceutical courier service”Note: Circuit for teams is saving hundreds of businesses at least 20% on delivery costs. Try it free for 7 days.
