Business mail rooms inundated with personal online shopping deliveries

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The latest IMRG MetaPack UK Delivery Index shows that delivery volumes in the UK grew by 12% in Q1 2016, in line with forecasts. The percentage of on-time deliveries remained at 94% where it has stood for the last few years.

Premium deliveries – such a next-day or specified day delivery – accounted for 35% of all orders, the highest share of the market since 2012. Furthermore, average parcel order values were also up, by 21% on the same period last year.

The above findings demonstrate “the growing trend for consumers to use a variety of delivery options that suit their lifestyles,” says MetaPack chief product officer, Kees de Vos. “The adoption of sophisticated personalization engines that really took off in 2015 is reaping dividends for retailers whose customers can choose exactly when and how their deliveries are made,” he added.

In other research, this time from Barclaycard, it was discovered that 8% of adults in the UK get their online orders delivered to their place of work every day. Four in ten do so “regularly”, suggesting that post room employees are handling far more than corporate mail. According to Barclaycard, business mail rooms can expect to see deliveries rising to nearly double the 3 million packages they usually receive, collectively, each day.

The main reasons for having online purchases delivered to the workplace was that for some, particularly those living in urban areas, they no longer have a private letterbox (16%) while more than half (51%) time off work to go to a collection office was not possible if they missed a delivery.

Purchases most likely to be sent to workplaces are books, cited by 47%, followed by electrical items (46%), clothing (37%), music (28%) and cosmetics (26%). For some unlucky mail room employees some of the more unusual deliveries cited by Barclaycard’s survey respondents include live animals and an inflatable zimmerframe.

Barclays Bank has recently been trialing click and collect lockers in branches to which Amazon deliveries can be made.

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Kristina Knight-1
Kristina Knight, Journalist , BA
Content Writer & Editor
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Kristina Knight is a freelance writer with more than 15 years of experience writing on varied topics. Kristina’s focus for the past 10 years has been the small business, online marketing, and banking sectors, however, she keeps things interesting by writing about her experiences as an adoptive mom, parenting, and education issues. Kristina’s work has appeared with BizReport.com, NBC News, Soaps.com, DisasterNewsNetwork, and many more publications.