I’ve just finished sifting through some of the recent stories that have gone up on eDelivery, making selections for our weekly newsletter. If you haven’t signed up for it, you’ll find details of how to at the end of this column.
There are three themes that stand out from the stories we’ve ran with this last week – speed, convenience, and trust; they’re three of the big fundamentals that underpin the industry.
In the south of England Argos has started promoting a trial of a new same-day collection and delivery service called Fast Track. You order and pay online, and for £3.95 you can expect your purchase to arrive later that day. Alternatively you can go and pick it up.
It’s a service that Argos has freed itself up to offer thanks to its efforts over the last year or two to reconfigure its logistics operations around its hub and spoke model, whereby it can ship pretty much any item to any store for customer collection, and for home delivery.
We also feature a report, this week, from Apex Insight into the growth of locker and parcel shop networks across Europe. The evolution of lockers from key-operated boxes typically used in a b2b environment to PIN-based, datalink-enabled PUDO points has seen the market for them start to take off. In Europe, Germany has the largest number, with other mature ecommerce markets also featuring high concentrations.
The appeal of lockers is likely to grow – as far as the shopping public is concerned – as the pressures on the final mile increase, after all convenience can be a relative concept. But if you’re out at work and your employer is cracking down on personal deliveries to the office, you’re going to have to find a solution. This is a topic we’ll be coming back to soon on eDelivery.
We also have an in-depth feature that looks at the issues of what shoppers expect and the potential for damaging trust when promises aren’t kept. There’s a great infographic that illustrates it, put together for us by the delivery management company Scurri. Trust, it seems, is paramount – 71% of shoppers trust the Post Office when it comes to deciding how to make a return.
Registration is still open for our first ever eDelivery Conference, which takes place on 13 October. You can find an overview of some of the speakers and themes you can look forward to here – we very much hope to see you there.
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Header image © Yanks9596 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL Commons]
