Amazon UK to offer collection service at corner shops Amazon is a to launch a service that lets UK customers pick up their purchases from one of 4,700 shops across Britain. The etailer has been secretly trialling pick-ups through shops that already work with PayPoint using its existing CollectPlus parcel service. CollectPlus is already available in selected local corner shops, …
That is EXACTLY what royal mail is planning though, and while my neighbours are ok, I would not like them bothered with taking delivery of a parcel (although this has happened once)
Personally i don't get why the royal mail can't leave undelivered mail with the local post office? surely that is WHY we have local post offices, so we can send & receive mail easily!
Where I live here up the Arctic arse end of nowhere the post office came up (a few years ago now) with the concept (literally translated) "post in the shop". In practice large numbers of local shops all over Norway contract with the Norwegian post office to provide basic postal services and, yes, function as a parcel delivery point. The system works very well. In our case it means that we can collect our parcels etc by walking roughly 200 meters.
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"You can already collect RM parcels from the sorting office"
Yes, but not always convenient, and not something many people check when they are buying a place, either.
Found out from neighbours that sorting office is 2 buses each way (not everyone drives, you see) and while 50p isn't much, if they could drop at a neighbour's (suitable in my case) that'd be preferable. However, the Amazon approach certainly has merit, in my view. I'll try it, for sure, but not to the exclusion of other retailers.
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"Delivery is a pain for those who work" - why? Everyone I knows gets their stuff delivered to the workplace or office. For most people their workplace (or base for mobile workers) is a very convenient drop off that is always manned during office hours by someone who can be trusted to keep a parcel for you
Not allowed where I work.
The Post room, and Goods In will turn anything away without an official order reference, and will not sign for or take responsibility for anything else.
If deliveries are made straight to the office, they often get "lost" and misdelivered - We have lost officially ordered equipment like filing cabinets etc which have been signed for with a squiggle and the driver cannot remember where he delivered too!
We take loads in for the neighbours and you end up keeping a lookout as the lazy arsed couriers lie just about all the time about leaving cards! Wish the missus got paid for the service.
Delivery to the corner shop is a good option for some of the stuff I order that I dont want the missus to know about though! Or that I want/need to claim is half the price it actually was!
I'm sure those who can have stuff delivered to work already do.
I'm a "mobile" worker. Unfortunately, the office is about 180 miles away and I only ever go there once or twice per year.
Likewise, depending on where you live, neighbours may not be an option for a number of reasons, some of which have already been mentioned.
This CollectPlus thing is not only a good idea, but I wonder why no one implemented it sooner. Even I thought this might be a good idea a couple of years ago. The nearest I've seen is the lockboxes you see in some garages/railway stations where parcel(s) are delivered but you have to insert a smart card and key in a pass code to get the locker open.
How narrow minded do you have to be to realise that this is an ideal solution for a lot of people - just because it doesn't directly benefit you doesn't mean it's not worth thinking about.
I'm a mobile worker and while, yes, a lot of the time I'm in the office or not away for that long - sometimes I can be away for weeks And if I want something urgently, it's horribly knowing that if the delivery is missed for whatever reason (These things do happen) or I have to leave early, my poor little parcel is sat on my desk for the next 3 weeks.
Same problem for having things delivered to where I'm working. Unless I pay for guaranteed delivery on a certain day, I'm taking the risk that I'm already off-site when it comes.
Will work for others, who aren't in an identical situation to you.
While some follow-ups mention workplaces not allowing it, there are also retailers who don't send to a work address, willing only to use the card address or registered PayPal address, so good luck with those, eh!
Great stuff, I have used CollectPlus before with other companies and it worked out great everytime.
I don't have to worry about being home and can pick up the item any time up until 10-11pm.
I wouldn't mind too much if items were left with my neighbour but most of them are all at work the same time I am.
Good idea if you ask me.
Here's an idea - any of you that do live a fair way from a shop offering this service - maybe amazon will let you get your stuff delivered to a shop near your workplace or some-place else you spend time during the day. Maybe you will miss your normal train home but a thirty minuet wait might be worth it in order to get your hands on Fifty Shades of Shit or whatever you buy from Amazon.
I didn't know HDNL had depots.
I've ordered two unrelated items which they attempted to deliver to suburban south Birmingham.
First was a relatively low value item returned to sender (ebuyer?) without any attempt to deliver to me (or a neighbour).
Second was sat for four weeks in the final courier's car, which had allegedly broken down. No one attempted to contact me, and tracking the parcel was tricky for reasons I forget. A 2nd class postcard to say "we have a package for you" would have been appreciated. I finally managed to track it down via the eBay seller and collected it myself (fortunately only a couple of miles away - I could have walked there except the item wasn't lightweight).
Not good. Based on that and feedback observed elsewhere, I no longer wish to do business with sellers that use HDNL.
Where I live, Royal Mail is good, as is ParcelForce's "collect it from the Post Office" (but mostly ParcelForce arrive before I leave for work). CityLink works too. Other couriers may be less convenient, some *much* less. Obviously there are local variations.
This sounds like a nice extra option, if it allows me to know HDNL will not be used.
Let me see.
Post office for me (delivery office) is 2 miles away.
City Link is 27 miles
DPD is 89 miles
TNT is 68 miles, but it's almost 2 hours to drive there.
Yodel is either 27 miles or 58, depending which depot it went via..
DHL is 78 miles.
Not everyone has the depots close to them.
Someone needs to give the courier companies a dam' good kicking - out of the 1980's.
I appreciate that they originally ran their business on fast and reliable deliveries to and from businesses - and therefore based their operations on a 9-5 / Mon-Fri schedule.
However, everyone else in the country has moved on. Those are now exactly the LEAST CONVENIENT times possible to attempt to deliver stuff to a huge proportion of the population - not to mention the times when the roads are at their most congested. We know that everyone from ASDA to pizza joints can manage to deliver stuff at weekends and outside traditional office hours, so there's no reason why the "names" in courierdom couldn't, either.
Obviously they all have a nice little earner going here: Yes, ma'am ... you want it delivered on a saturday <sound of teeth being sucked> we'll have to charge you extra. Sunday? <boggle> oh no, we don't get out of bed on sundays". Even though there is a much larger labour force of competent, willing and honest deliverers available, a lot of whom would gladly take the opportunity to have a second job.
You never know, with just the tiniest bit of organisation, initiative and customer service awareness, your Amazon consignment could well turn up with your 10 inch thin-crust.
Maybe the loss of business that results from this will "encourage" the useless lardy Royal Mail and courier companies to deliver at hours that suit their customers (like the supermarkets do). Or, they could go out of business, for being useless, which has a lot of promise...
Unfortunately using Collect+ means the delivery firms are still getting the business, if not more actually, as it still uses a combination of CityLink DHL and others to deliver to and from the shops.
I've been using this service for ages actually, so Amazon are a bit slow to pick this up (pun alert!!)
If they could make a profit out of Saturday/Sunday deliveries then they would offer the service.
The problem is that everybody, for some reason, wants to get paid more when they work over the weekend. Then if you pay them extra for the weekend they want 2 other days off during the week when your at your busiest. It's ridiculous. Those greedy workers should work 7 days a week at normal pay and be grateful for it. Of course, they could employ more people but the amount of weekend deliveries would mean making a loss.
"Of course, they could employ more people but the amount of weekend deliveries would mean making a loss."
That's one way of looking at it. If people like Amazon are going to support alternate means of people receiving deliveries, what will the Royal Mail be left with ? Fewer and fewer organisations are sending out printed material in the post, written letters (as opposed to cards) are very rare.
The Royal Mail want to milk the Post Code database they seem to own, hence they are using their staff to plot addresses to high levels of accuracy. This all sounds like the action of a company like Kodak - slowly going down the pan, not innovating early enough, hoping their IP will save the day.
Royal Mail - innovate. No one wants you to die. The Canadian lady in charge should realise this.
DPD are one of the best couriers since they tell you when they are going to arrive at your house, so if you are working in the same town you can go home.
Yodel on the other hand will just throw your parcel over your fence.
Royal Mail have the worst tracking system imaginable, they need to bring that into this decade.
I guess it depends on your local office. I've had DPD repeatedly claim to have tried to deliver stuff when they've done no such thing; when they do turn up their line of questioning ("what is your relationship to the recipient?") gets a little intrusive. The local Yodel chaps tend to be very reliable, though.
DPD are the worst courier. Sure, they tell you when they are going to arrive - but only to within a two hour window, so you still have to take a half-day off work to be there. That's assuming they actually show up, of course; I've had them deliver outside the window several times.
On top of which, if you miss the delivery their depots - or my local one, at least - are only open in normal business hours plus two hours on Saturday morning. My local depot is also out of the way on an industrial estate that isn't served by buses at the weekend, so as a non-driver I basically can't get a DPD parcel delivered to my home without burning leave - I have to get them sent to my office. The last time I did that, they claimed to have been by to deliver it when I know for a fact they hadn't. If they had, they would have noticed that the reception desk is manned full time and has CCTV and not tried to tell such an obvious lie.
What a fabulous idea! Let's have a network of small shops that sell newspapers, confectionery, etc and also provide services to send and receive letters and parcels; put one in every village and larger ones in towns. Now what shall we call them? How about.... "post offices"?
The fact that someone considers it worthwhile to do this just shows how utterly screwed the P.O. is.
Why don't we have these "post offices" of which you speak open till ten or eleven at night, when working folks can get to them rather then them shuttering at four or five when said working folks are, you know, miles away, at work?
Something like the CollectPlus service has been running in Japan for a few years now based around the "konbini" (convenience store) chains like Lawson's, 7-11 etc. Many of the city centre konbinis are open 24 hours a day so data-centre night owls getting off shift at two in the morning can collect their Rakuten or Amazon.co.jp deliveries at their, ahem, convenience. They can even pay for the deliveries using an NFC swipe built into their ketai (mobile phone) which is, I understand, the next great Apple invention which inventive Apple has invented and nobody else on the planet ever has invented.
Where I live, all the couriers are 50+ miles to their depot, and whilst I can unofficially get stuff delivered to work, it's not something I like to do too often, likewise annoying the neighbors.
Collect+ is perfect for me, and will mean Amazon gets 100% of my business now.
Time to switch from my Play.com creditcard to the Amazon one (both MBNA thou).
I thought the same when I ordered a map this afetrnoon and was offered the collect option...
Unfortunately, despite collect+ showing 3 locations within a mile of where I live, Amazon's site told me there were none, so I have to wonder; just "how close" you have to live to a collect+ location to benefit from the service?
I tried Collecplus recently. I had a faulty modem to return to Virginmedia. Looked up the local collectplus, and it was a shop I knew well, and I was vaguely aware they did it. Made a little detour driving home from work, and got told when I got there that they no longer did it. Apparently the drivers were horribly unreliable, and would sometimes only drop off, and not pick up - if they ever turned up at all. So much so, they'd end up with piles of parcels stacking up, going nowhere. Consequentially they ditched it. The only other place in town doing it is the opposite side of town to me, so I've got to faff about to get to it. Ended up calling Virgin back and telling them I couldn't be bothered, it's their problem - so they gave me a freepost address to send it to. Royal Mail to the rescue!
The idea is great, but it only works if they use a half-decent courier to back it... and Yodel ain't it. Personally, I get stuff delivered to work. I let our postroom know if I've got something coming, and it works quite nicely. A lot of these storage companies offer delivery services so you can have items delivered to them, and collect from their shop fronts.
I needed to send a camera back to Argos for repair, and they use a local petrol station on my way to work. Brilliant, as personal deliveries are frowned on at my company. Now it's Amazon too - excellent.
Bad news for eBay though! They could offer a service for sellers to drop off and buyers to pick up. But will they?
I loath City-Link. Time after time I am home when they are supposed to deliver but they fail. I'm near the end of their round so if is getting late they just records as 'not at home'. When you ring up to find out why they didn't deliver you can almost hear them laughing down the phone at you. So it is off to the depot to collect said item. For me it is a 50 mile round trip. Don't forget to take at least one photo ID and utility bills... (who has paper bills these days) or ELSE. They won't give you your stuff and they are rude about it.
By contract, ParcelForce are a pleasure to deal with. If I'm not in they drop it off at the loacl sub post office. Spot on.
The local store that Amazon would probably use is also the Post Office. What goes around comes around then...
Seems good in principle and nice to have as an option. However I'm slightly surprised by how far my local Collect+ points are. I really hope it works and they end up with more outlets because my employers aren't keen on me getting parcels there and I live in the kind of apartment that is utterly impenetrable when it comes to deliveries :(
Evolve or die, much as I'd like to I can't afford to subsidise their working practices if they don't suit me, and to be honest if I'm not in for parcel deliveries because I'm at work I probably can't go to the shops either.
Radical thought, why don't they open when most of the people with money aren't busy earning it?
> This is one more nail towards their coffin.
The high street has been dying ever since payment started to be accepted over the internet.
About the only thing I buy from the high street now is furniture. That is only because it is something that you really do have to look at and touch before you buy. It is also something that is easily damaged in transit so having a shop and/or a person to go and complain to makes it easier to remedy.
... we knew and loved you well.
However they are busy shooting themselves in the foot. Our local sorting office, one of the larger ones in the country, is about a mile down the road. They cut their hours from about 9 to 4 to 9 to 12. Every now again I have seen (we have a camera) a postie with a parcel (not out regular one who has letters and small items, he's excellent) throw a card in and not ring the bell, or ring it and dart off before someone reaches the door. Oh did I mention queuing at the sorting office, takes up to half an hour to get through the dozen or so people there?
Collect+, not bad, round the corner, next door to the Post Office, but longer, much longer, hours, however one big caveat, they have a wireless scanner, and it doesn't always work. So it's always hit or miss, scans and connect, hooray, if it doesn't, then get in the car and drive a mile and a half to the next closets one (in that radius there are five others), Failure rate to date is 50%.
I thought "that little shop in the back roads would be perfect for this", so I went to the site and found the (only) local point is indeed the shop not too far away.
Almost justifies the image I put on Panoramio (for Google earth) a few years ago after stumbling across the place while on a walk, I thought more people should know that little place exists and keeps long hours.
I try where possible to put business locally but this town (and many round here) has atrophied to the stage that I rarely visit, at least this is footfall and if I need some emergency HobNobs I know where to go.
When I lived back home in Blighty I remember the good old Post Office did a fine job just leaving expensive electronics, or whatever else you ordered by the front door, courteously ringing the doorbell, letting the people that weren't at home that their package was free-for-all. Courier services would be more thoughtful and hand your goods to job-shy smack addict neighbours.
But nostalgically here in the US, while Fed-Ex and the post office politely leave a "pick your kit up at our place after 5pm or wait until tomorrow if you prefer" card, UPS still employ the old-school method of leaving whatever you've ordered in the rain.
We don't get mail delivery to our door anymore.
There is a bank of locking mailboxes at the end of the street and a couple of larger lockers.
If they need to deliver a parcel they put it in a locker and put the key in your mail box.
And because it's a rural area, UPS and Fedex drop stuff off at the post office who know you and give you a call when something big arrives
As a roaming breakfix engineer I have been collecting parts from secure boxes at the side of garages and from taxi offices for years. The parts are always on route to the job so I rarely have to deviate.
Likewise any returns I drop off the same way.
Im surprised its taken Amazon this long to figure it out
Wow, so almost everyone on here has little or no understanding of the logistics industry, How typical, I deliver on behalf of a company called Hermes. We handle many different contracts including Amazon parcels. I can have anything up to 200 deliveries per day, which can be about 9-10 hours worth work. I have no choice to deliver during normal working hours, as there simply is not enough time to deliver all the parcels between 6pm and 7pm like you all seem to want. Internet shopping is increasing month by month as more and more people want the convenience of shopping at home., but no a\ allowances are made for the couriers who have to deliver.
We are all under pressure not to return parcels undelivered, so to say couriers don't attempt deliveries is nonsense, any courier returning to many parcels wouldn't stay in the job more than a few days.
When you order something, do you expect to be in? If not, please your porch, gate or garage door unlocked, that way we can safely leave your parcel for you, if your in a terraced house or flats, might be worth asking a neighbour in advance if they will take your parcel, then leave a note for the courier to leave with that neighbour, the whole works much more smoothly if a neighbour is expecting us, rather than being disturbed unexpectedly.
For those of you living out of town, make sure your house name/number is easily visible,. the posty who does the round everyday might know where your house is, a courier it might be their first time in your area, and if your address isn't obvious then your stuff won't be delivered. as we don't have time to waste looking for someone who doesn't make it clear where they are.
Lastly, if you are in, then make sure your not hanging round in the garden all day where you can't hear us knocking. Make sure your out of bed, as we can't spend 10 minutes for you to get dressed and stagger down the stairs. Many of us will be knocking doors from 7:30 onwards so be prepared.
I welcome parcel shops, it will allow people who are never at home another option., but you could all save yourself some trouble by helping the couriers who deliver your goods.
No gripe at all with when you attempt delivery during the day - I'll be out at work. At a place where I can't (and don't want) stuff delivered to (it tends to go "missing").
The problem I as a customer have is that a lot of retailers use Royal Mail. Who are beyond useless. If I make a special effort to stay in, I get a "sorry you were out card" anyway. And if it's not a timed delivery, it's anyone's guess as to when the item will show up (central city location yet still 1st class regularly takes anywhere up to 10 working days from the same city).
Which means at some point a few days later I have to go and put up with the obnoxious sorting office staff. But not on a Saturday. Only between something 07:00-12:00. Which is inconvenient for much the same reason as why they couldn't deliver in the first place.
However, my corner shop, which was on the corner, and open till late at night would have been ideal.
Well done Amazon, you'll put final nail in Royal Mail's coffin.
I just checked, and CollectPlus have a couple of agents near me. It looks a decent option, though there are also a few horror stories on the Internet. It doesn't take many such stories to look way too prominent.
It used to be, when you paid by debit/credit card, that they would only deliver to the card address. Has that safeguard against the crooks ended?
anyway, my prediction:
1) Amazon will tie up with one, or more major supermarket to piggyback onto their online shopping deliveries
2) As above, but to offer some sort of locker facility at the mega-stores.
Tesco have already subbed their cafe service to Costa, so I would suggest they are the more adventurous of the retailers.
As far as I can see it's a win-win for the retailers. Maybe I should patent the system ?
You need to ask for a sticker to put on or near your letterbox.
http://public.datasquirt.co.uk/cscommsroyalmail/forms/Delivery%20to%20Neighbour%20Opt-out
I'll be opting out, we took in a parcel for next-door once and he got the arse because we didn't drop it round the instant he arrived home. Then again, he is a twunt of the first order.
I know Collect+ is going to be convenient for some, but it isn't for others, so an additional option would be nice - for me the local Post Office is far closer and easier to get to - it would be nice if they also gave an option to leave it there.
For me, there are 2 Collect+ points near me or my workplace (within 10 miles). The first is almost exactly on the way home, or more accurately, a 20 minute walk from work, as you can't park anywhere near it. The second is nearer home, but due to the amount of placards they've put near the entrance, it's damned dangerous to try to drive out of it (you either have to "use the force" or have to have your eyes level with the bottom of the window glass to see under the placards) ...
Plus, in my limited experience, Collect+ is slow - the one (and only) time I've used it, it took nearly 2 weeks for the item to get to Amazon (I don't typically carry cash, so the pay to post it and get refunded is a pain - much preferred the print your own Royal Mail label approach they took).
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