Must offer nationwide shipping within 24 hours – E24

– We are entering the market of parcel transport for online shopping. Now we are in possible online stores and we are establishing a dialogue. The goal in the start-up is to offer the online store customers in the larger cities “north of Trondheim”, either the same day or the next day without costing the “shirt”, says Thomas Lone , Widerøe transport manager to E24.

– In today’s online stores, customers can often choose between different delivery solutions. We want Widerøe to be one of those options, he continues.

The company has already created a website called flydet.no where the countdown to the launch on February 1 is underway.

– The statistics show, paradoxically, that the further north you live in the country, the more you shop online. At the same time, delivery time tends to be longer the further you get from the four big cities, Lone says.

– Measured per capita, Berlevåg is Norway’s e-commerce capital, he adds.

It has a warehouse, people, cars and planes.

The idea and work on the new project were created in 2020, the year of crisis in which airlines and others working in the industry have had to downsize and lay off employees, cut routes and take other brutal measures.

– It has been a process that has been happening in 2020. Now we feel we have come so far that we can talk about it, says Lone.

Until launch, Widerøe will work fully to secure customer agreements and the final details on the solution.

Widerøe has had to lay off and notify the downsizing, among other things, in the ground service Widerøe Ground Handling due to the fall in traffic this year. The company sees investing in e-commerce as a way to generate additional income and use the infrastructure that the company has:

– We have stock at most major airports, we have people and cars at airports, and of course we have our planes, says Lone.

– What we want is to use this capacity in a good way in the prevailing market situation, he continues.

Growth ambitions for shipping

Widerøe is not currently certified for end-to-end refrigerated shipping, and the company plans to start with ordinary e-commerce products at its new venture.

– Will you be the one who will go out to collect the merchandise in stock and deliver it to the end customers?

– There are two ways we should solve this. In a pilot phase, we will solve it ourselves with the destination in which we launched the offer. In the long term, we will follow demand and expand if there is room for it, Lone says, continuing:

– In some locations, we may have to team up with partners for pickups and deliveries.

The company does not want to disclose how much of Widerøe’s turnover comes from shipping.

– But we have the ambition to significantly increase the turnover of shipments, he says.

– In this project, scalability is important, both in terms of future volume and future destinations to which we can expand in the future. We have also made plans for the day when there will not be enough capacity with the passenger jets we have in the fleet, he continues.

Lone says that Widerøe has the capacity to take more cargo than today, and that the available capacity varies depending on the route and the time you look.

– But our systems have a great flexibility to use the available capacity.

Since many online store warehouses are located in the center-east region, there will be “some” imbalance in the flow of cargo.

– But if there are e-commerce players in northern Norway who want to reach a national market, of course we will do our part to support it, he says.