Efficient Delivery Routes
You are might giggle a little about this. The key to our efficient delivery routing is in….Mapquest. No joke. I thought I’d graduated past the point in my life when that tool was useful, too.
But Mapquest is actually a pretty powerful tool AND it’s free. In order to make the best use of the Mapquest routing feature, you need to know that it has some limits.
Mapquest can take up to 26 stops. I suggest that if you have over 26 stops that you sort of separate them into groups of 26 or fewer. Know the general order in which you think you’ll be placing those groups. We drive a round circuit. The goal is to pass through the most towns/areas without back tracking.
Put your addresses in a spreadsheet like this: (download my template here to use in Excel or Google Sheets)
The spreadsheet columns should be organized like this: (there are template files right in Mapquest if you need help setting up your spreadsheet.
Street Address | City | State | Zip Code | Country
Alternatively- your e-commerce site may allow you to download a record of your sales with the addresses as a spreadsheet. We just do this and edit the columns to match the Mapquest parameters. That is faster for us than typing them all into a new spreadsheet.
Upload your spreadsheets as Excel or .csv files into Mapquest. Be sure to look at the routing options and make sure that you enable the button that says “let us re-order stops”. Choose “shortest distance” or "shortest time” or try both and see if there is a difference for your route.
If you have 26 stops or fewer you can enable the “round” trip feature. Otherwise - you’ll be making a couple different routes and just looking at them sequentially.
Let me know if you have any questions. This process works great for us here for long Flower Club routes and retail home deliveries on Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, etc.
