Direct store delivery

Direct store delivery (DSD) is a key method of selling and distributing products for a large variety of industries, like food, beverage, home personal care products, and like wholesale and distribution, oil & gas, service industries to name industries beyond consumer products. ^[1]

DSD is a business process that manufacturers use to both sell and distribute goods directly to point of sales (PoS) or point of consumption (PoC) including additional product and market related services such as merchandising, information gathering, or equipment service and bypassing any retailer or wholesaler logistics. A company that performs DSD does not send goods to any locations using any independent third party actor – neither an independent wholesaler, nor the retailer‘s own warehouses.

DSD is an alternative distribution model to centralized distribution and tends to be used extensively in the food industry for fresh products such as milk and bread where minimizing the number of days in the supply chain is a key concern. Similarly, DSD is used effectively for full truckload orders where bypassing distribution centers makes economic sense. DSD is also a favored approach when there is a strong requirement for supplier knowledge or service such as is the case with greeting cards for example. Having said this, there is pressure building up in the food supply chain to reduce the retailer's reliance on DSD and push more volume through centralized distribution channels.

The Standard Interchange Language (SIL) acts as an interface standard for transferring data between proprietary store systems like DSD and PoS.