If you live in a building with a doorman, you don’t need Doorman. If you don’t, you do. The company is making it easy to accept deliveries when you’re out and about, but realized it was getting so successful in changing the patterns of how its customers do online shopping that it was effectively losing money on each customer.
“We didn’t expect that Doorman would completely change peoples’ shopping behavior,” the company’s founder and CEO, Zander Adell, tells me. “We now know that Doorman customers shop online twice as much within 6 months of signing up. Unfortunately, that means our original $19 and $29 per month plans stopped making sense, and we’re in effect losing a lot of money on some of our customers.”
The company’s new payment tiers are greatly simplified — and a lot more expensive than the old plans.
The new payment plans go into effect in December. People who were on the original Silver and Gold unlimited parcels plan are getting nudged down to the Basic $19 per month plan, which includes 5 packages per month. The other new plans are Plus ($35 per month, which includes 10 packages at $3.50 each, with additional parcels charged at $4.50), Pro ($55 per month) and Premium ($89 per month). At the top-end plan, the company also introduces cardboard box recycling, so customers don’t have to deal with the recycling themselves.
Incidentally, I always wondered whether Doorman should introduce a crate delivery service: I would pay a lot of money to not have to deal with the frankly obscene number of Amazon boxes that turn up on my doorstep every month, and it seems like just bringing me their contents in a crate would make a lot more sense (and a lot less hassle for me).
Along with the announcement of the end of the unlimited plans, Doorman is teasing a number of new features the company has in the pipeline, including support for returns shipping, oversized packages, alcohol, on-demand, daytime, later cutoffs, etc.
The company currently still operates only in San Francisco, New York and Chicago, but has ambitions for further expansion in the imminent future.