Delivering the goods

PARCEL deliveries are often thwarted by menacing dogs, doorstep thieves, unanswered doorbells or a host of other impediments that keep goods from their intended destination. Even demography plays a role: young consumers are less willing than older folk to stay at home waiting for a delivery. Businesses suffer as a result. Two-fifths of online shoppers said they stopped buying products from a website following a troublesome delivery, according to the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), a British industry association.

Customers and sellers should welcome the growth of a new way to ensure that goods are delivered quickly and safely. Parcels are increasingly shipped not to home addresses but to local businesses, where they are held for pick-up. This summer Amazon, an American online-retail giant, is expanding a network of delivery lockers in local shops in some of America’s biggest cities as well as in London. A locker pops open when a customer enters an access code received by e-mail or text message. Other companies are building even bigger locker networks, especially in Europe.

Some shoppers are willing to pay to avoid home deliveries. ByBox, a British firm, charges shoppers about £2 ($3.15) to retrieve a parcel from one of its 1,350 locations around the country. Other locker networks are free. Delivery firms can save lots of money by sending a batch of parcels to a single place, where delivery is guaranteed, so they are naturally keen to provide the service. Nine out of ten Germans live or work within about ten minutes of free lockers operated by Deutsche Post DHL. The French and Turkish post offices also provide free locker services.

There are other advantages too. More efficient deliveries can take the strain off lorries and other shipping infrastructure. In Britain this is running close to capacity at peak periods, says Andrew Starkey of IMRG. Merchants, then, welcome the deployment of more and better infrastructure. Add-on innovations should make buying and selling online even easier. For example, Cleveron, an Estonian firm, has introduced lockers with credit-card readers across northern Europe. These cubby holes can collect payment for the goods being collected.

A lower-tech delivery system also shows great promise. Growing numbers of shops and other businesses are holding packages behind the counter for later collection. One delivery network has signed up over 1,050 local shops in America and Canada and is adding about two dozen outlets a week. Gareth Sudul, head of Kinek, the firm behind the scheme, says that businesses like the simplicity of providing a “KinekPoint” service. No special kit is required. All shops have to do is log deliveries and pick-ups through a website that automatically sends e-mail and text-message alerts to addressees.

Pick-up locations typically charge from about $3 to release a package, passing on $1 to Kinek. People fetching a parcel also often buy a few items. The lure of extra sales has led some shops to hand over the packages for nothing, coughing up $1 just to have someone walk through the door.

Not everyone will join in. Questions over insurance liability might hamper the growth of pick-up services. And in America online merchants avoid charging sales tax in some states by neither having a physical presence nor hiring staff there. So they may be wary of putting lockers in these parts of the country. Some consumers, having paid for door-to-door delivery, will not want to traipse to a nearby shop or petrol station to collect their parcels. But the growth of online sales means that exasperation levels with home deliveries and the attraction of a rapid pick-up are sure to rise.