A single courier can save up to 9 liters of fuel per day – this is how online ordering changes fuel consumption

One ​​of the biggest social advantages of online shopping is that the shopping of several households is “covered” by a single vehicle, and on an optimized route. According to Kifli.hu data, a courier covers an average of 217 kilometers a day, during which time he delivers 29 orders. This means that nearly 30 separate shopping trips are made with a single car.

A conservative starting point for the fuel requirements of shopping trips, which is in line with Hungarian reality, is that one shopping trip means an average of about 10-12 kilometers of driving there and back. Considering the 7-liter consumption of an average passenger car, 29 purchases would therefore require about 24 liters of fuel, while a courier uses an average of 15 liters per day – the difference can be as much as 9 liters per courier per day, which potentially represents 30-40 percent in fuel consumption.

Of course, not all shoppers go to the store by car; in urban environments, some shopping trips are made on foot or by public transport. However, car use is typical for large purchases, and this is even more true in suburban and agglomeration areas, and here the distance traveled per purchase can also be longer.

“Online shopping cannot replace individual car use in all situations, but where it can, it can significantly reduce the number of trips required and thus the amount of fuel used”

– said Szilveszter Sasvári, marketing manager at Kifli.hu.

According to Kifli’s internal research, with an average order, customers can save 4-5 hours compared to shopping in stores. During its six-year operation this year, the online supermarket has already fulfilled more than ten million orders, which means a total of about 40 million hours saved – roughly 4,500 years of time that families could spend with each other, not rushing around. And the 10 million deliveries, calculated using the above model, could have resulted in up to 3 million liters of unburned fuel.

Online shopping not only saves families significant time for what is really important, but can also be decisive in terms of transportation and energy consumption in everyday life and in sustainability. And in a time when the uncertainty of fuel prices and energy markets also affects everyday decisions, reducing parallel roads and urban traffic can be particularly important. In addition to fuel, it is enough to think that the activities of one Kifli courier can replace the traffic of 15-30 individual cars.

Online ordering alone is not enough for all these positive effects; advanced, optimized logistics solutions are also needed that serve the best routes, smart distribution of orders and minimizing empty runs. Kifli.hu invested a total of HUF 2.8 billion in the development of the Hungarian market between 2020 and 2024. The development of the new automated-robotic logistics center in Biatorbágy, which will open at the end of 2025, surpasses all this: its value is approximately double the company’s total investment in Hungary to date.