New Parcels Business from Amazon?

[westcoaster]

Talking of Amazon does anyone else get amazon goods delivered by APLE. We do and it's very annoying. No matter if you go super saver, 24 hour or first class this company delivers them.
We ordered some stuff and paid first class to get it delivered by Royal Mail on Saturday morning. On Friday we got a email to say our parcels had been split to get it to us faster, one came on Friday evening at 19:55 and the other on Saturday evening at 18:30. Two whole days wasted waiting for something ( no delivery time estimates either just anytime 07:00-21:00). Very annoyed about it complained and got our delivery charges back.

Seems this company APLE now delivers all orders in our local area from Amazon.

 

[jon0844]

I try and get most of my stuff delivered to a nearby Amazon locker for the very reason that it can be annoying having to wait in all day for the free delivery you get with Prime (unless you pay extra). It's not that long a walk, and gives me the freedom to pop out whenever I want and not fear the dreaded card being left and a long trip to a depot, or another 24 hour wait with no idea of when it will come.

As you can't decide the carrier Amazon will use, some can drop things through a letterbox without a signature, others need one regardless. Again, annoying. As well as Amazon often using way too much packaging that stops a letterbox being suitable even for small, flat, items.

I've even had the bizarre situation where a courier arrived shortly before the allotted time that I had been texted, and I saw him parked on the drive.

So I wondered what was going on and opened the door, only for him to come out and apologise that because it wasn't 10am he wasn't able to deliver as the system won't let him deliver early! So I told him to come in and wait, until his device hit 10am and I could sign.

Now I know someone would likely complain about someone coming early, but that did seem rather stupid. He could knock and see if anyone was home, and if not, either opt to wait or come back within the delivery window. How stupid to have him parked up and having to wait for his PDA to say when he could hand over the goods.

Also, can you get larger letter boxes on doors now to take into account home deliveries?

 

[Baxenden Bank]

Why is all this necessary? Being a postman it saddens me seeing all these fly by night operations and operators taking a slice while we are reduced to making ends meet by delivering pizza leaflets.

Because the proper post is declining rapidly. I used to have a regular postman who delivered before I went to work in the morning. Now I have a random assortment who come at any time of the day - rarely earlier than 1000 and as late as 1730 some days. First class usually takes 3 days, second class is, like, you know, whenever. Sometimes I think my package won't be coming because postie has been with my pizza leaflets, then a man and a little red van turns up later. As one poster says, I don't want to be a prisoner in my home all day.

Having said that, I still think Royal Mail is significantly better than the rest, except perhaps Tesco Direct who even deliver on a Sunday and you can book your time slot - useful when your cooker breaks down just before Christmas! However, all the delivery companies are in a race to the bottom as far as I can see.

My experience of the other private companies is not good. I have always preferred Royal Mail and even stopped using Amazon for a few years when they shipped with Securicor / Omega. It was such great fun to watch him deliver to the shop directly beneath our office but then say he couldn't find us so took my (personal) parcels back to the depot - if he even had it on his van in the first place!

I want reliability, if collecting it from a convenient local newsagent / rail station / shopping centre locker gives me that, I'll go for it. It will be a doddle in fact - hence the name which I think is great by the way.

Royal Mail needs to take a look at itself - later deliveries, earlier collections, massive price increases for modest packages such as books and CD's.
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You can say that again

Our enquiry office is open from 7am-2pm and 4pm-7pm. Yours?

0730 to 1430 mon-fri, earlier closing on sat, situated on a dual carriageway with bus stop 1 mile away!

Just had this great idea - could someone open a chain of outlets, thousands of them, on the high street, in (nearly) every town, suburb and even villages, where you could select your parcel to be delivered to. We could call them offices for post or something similar!

Surprised the new, shiny, privatised, gung-ho go getting Royal Mail aren't ahead of the game on this one, done a deal with the PO counters business, and put the whole PO branch network into the Amazon database as pick-up locations - and other on-line retailers as well.

 

[Kite159]

0730 to 1430 mon-fri, earlier closing on sat, situated on a dual carriageway with bus stop 1 mile away!

I raise you with Bulford Camp collection office

A couple years ago it was 0930 to 1300 Mon-Friday only. Although it has got good parking & a bus-stop nearby .

Not sure if it still has these stupid hours, haven't been there for a couple years

 

[DownSouth]

Surprised the new, shiny, privatised, gung-ho go getting Royal Mail aren't ahead of the game on this one, done a deal with the PO counters business, and put the whole PO branch network into the Amazon database as pick-up locations - and other on-line retailers as well.

It can be done!

Australia Post (which faces some of the same issues as Royal Mail, but not direct competition on basic postal services) has a number of relationships with online retailers to ensure smooth service - including, most interestingly as it started well before the Australian office was opened, Wiggle.co.uk

If I get stuff from Wiggle it will have an Australia Post tracking number before it even leaves the warehouse in Portsmouth, and if I need to return anything I simply get to take it into any PostShop or agency with the return reference number and the staff there will load up the details from their system, package it and send it off.

 

[Clip]

Imagine in a few years if you want free delivery from Amazon or other internet shopping service it will be to a collection point, if you want delivery to your home it will cost you extra.

It's a good idea to have things delivered to a secure locker, be it in a railway station, petrol station or shopping centre, if it is too large to fit though a letter box, saves the hassle of collecting from the sorting office, you can collect on the way home.

The one issue with everything going to lockers is the security of the people taking them home with them if they have to walk or use further transport like a bus. The bigger the box the bigger the risk Id say - thieves like easily sellable items lik eelectronics.

 

[jon0844]

As it is, the lockers don't generally offer that many large lockers and even things I'm sure would fit come up as undeliverable to them.

And of course the best thing is nobody knows what you're picking up. Not that I've collected at midnight yet, even though I could.

Today I collected a phone worth £600 and it came in a box that could well contain a paperback book for all anyone else knew.

 

[marcouk2]

They must have changed some of the restrictions on what you can have delivered to lockers.

The time before last that I ordered a camera battery Amazon refused to let me have it via a locker but no issue when ordering one 2 weeks ago followed by a bunch of AA rechargeables the week after.

And the locker size has restricted me in the past, especially with Amazon's packaging being on the bulky side sometimes. :-x

 

[Clip]

As it is, the lockers don't generally offer that many large lockers and even things I'm sure would fit come up as undeliverable to them.

And of course the best thing is nobody knows what you're picking up. Not that I've collected at midnight yet, even though I could.

Today I collected a phone worth £600 and it came in a box that could well contain a paperback book for all anyone else knew.

You're right but the theif doesnt know whats ina womans handbag either but the risk is still there and they still get stolen from their arms.

They only have to get lucky once in 10 to make it worthwhile.

 

[jon0844]

And the locker size has restricted me in the past, especially with Amazon's packaging being on the bulky side sometimes. :-x

Yeah, that can be an understatement at times!!

You're right but the theif doesnt know whats ina womans handbag either but the risk is still there and they still get stolen from their arms.

They only have to get lucky once in 10 to make it worthwhile.

True, but many times I've withdrawn an awful lot of cash from a bank and carried it through some dodgy areas and banked on the fact that nobody knew. (And I should point out, I didn't take the money out IN said bad area so as to be followed).

The same goes for when I used to work for budget control for a London council, and before payments were made direct to bank accounts. We looked after payments to people in care homes, and that meant collecting giros from the post office that probably added up to tens of thousands of pounds. Although we always travelled to/from the post office in pairs, it was considered safe on the basis that nobody knew.

You could get unlucky obviously, but I don't think my local locker (in a shopping centre) is a high risk area. Maybe if everyone starts using them things will change though.

What you said does remind me of something that annoys me in the press when you hear of a little old lady that was robbed 'for just £5'. Clearly the thief didn't know s/he was going to only get £5!!

 

[DelayRepay]

The one issue with everything going to lockers is the security of the people taking them home with them if they have to walk or use further transport like a bus. The bigger the box the bigger the risk Id say - thieves like easily sellable items lik eelectronics.

True - in part it depends on the location of the locker but is it any different from buying an item from a traditional shop? If I bought an item from PC World I'd have to carry it home and chances are it would be in a PC World bag so a pretty good advert to any would be thieves that it might be a valuable item. I think if you use lockers in a sensible place (e.g inside a shopping centre) and use common sense the risk of robbery can be mitigated.

 

[Clip]

Yes I get all that - we could all point to situations where we have done something that couldve gotten us robbed of our goods.

But thats fine if we are going to miss the point I was making.

never mind. These are a great idea and nothing will ever happen to anyone by making a move towards it rather than Royal mail pulling their finger out their arses and making delivery depots open at decent times.

 

[jon0844]

Lockers shouldn't be putting Royal Mail out of business, as not everyone wants to go out to collect things. Some will because they're at work, others will think it weird to go to a shopping centre or petrol station to collect a package that could come to the front door.

Royal Mail needs to adapt, perhaps by offering evening deliveries or timed slots. And if you're not home for a normal delivery, perhaps an evening pick up at the sorting office all week.

 

[maniacmartin]

Perhaps Royal Mail and Post Office could offer their own lockers.

 

[Drsatan]

Royal Mail needs to adapt, perhaps by offering evening deliveries or timed slots. And if you're not home for a normal delivery, perhaps an evening pick up at the sorting office all week.

I agree, why should Royal Mail not adapt to the increased popularity of online shopping by offering evening (and possibly Sunday) deliveries? As Royal Mail has been privatised, there should be no restrictions on being able to offer those services, if the company wanted to.

However, the same argument was trotted out when privatisation of the railways was proposed in the early 1990s: that the new companies would be able to compete and provide a better service for the passenger. Of course, the latter hasn't happened, so I won't expect any miracles from Royal Mail either.

Offering evening and Sunday deliveries will require recruiting more postmen, and more sorting office staff. I won't be holding my breath for that to happen.

 

[jon0844]

Royal Mail seems to want to have less staff, or make them work extra hard. But I guess that's inevitable if you've allowed private companies to take on the lucrative work and ignore the expensive stuff.

As someone has said, it's a race to the bottom.

I am quite disappointed that the postman that delivers will now do a collection at around the same time, and that could mean a collection in the morning. Suddenly that makes it rather hard to post something during a normal working day to get somewhere the next day, if the postal deadline is 9.30 or 10am!

Of course there will always be a place to post later, and it seems that an old rule about having to have a post box within a certain distance is forcing the Royal Mail to keep them when it clearly doesn't want to continue collections at great expense. I guess we'll see a huge drop in usage at small post boxes on estates, and that will justify an attempt to getting the requirement to provide post boxes to serve all homes scrapped.

Then everyone will have to go to a main post office or high street post box, which they'll have been doing anyway, so there won't be much fuss.

Things do need to change though. Allowing people to collect from a post office or sorting office out of hours, which could even include asking to have the item held there in the first place, could be a very cheap option. Unions might fear for job losses, but if people aren't using the Royal Mail, there will be job losses anyway - or simply a mass migration of staff to other firms that are adapting to the needs of consumers today.

The move to lockers (although, to be fair, I don't know how popular they are) suggests people might want to order something online but not actually have it delivered to their home. Some people aren't allowed to have deliveries at work, and sometimes the delivery might not be convenient at work anyway (size, weight etc). To be able to order something now, at 2am, and potentially have it delivered to a locker after 1pm later today, and then pick up at your leisure until midnight or beyond is, to me, awesome.

Now Amazon might have the power to do its own thing, but what about everyone else? What about all the businesses in competition with Amazon that could have gone to the Royal Mail to provide a rival service before someone else set something new up?

 

[telstarbox]

There is ByBox, another locker service independent of Amazon. However, Amazon seem to have more locations and in more convenient locations, particularly the ones inside Co-op supermarkets.

 

[starrymarkb]

There is another company as well with one on the local Texaco forecourt

 

[higthomas]

An alternative is the under used collect plus sceme, which has many more locations than I expect amazon ever will, helps corner shops and works with any company.

 

[radamfi]

I have used ByBox in the past and I got a lot of free collections while they were still testing, but once they started charging to collect I only used them occasionally.

Another advantage of Amazon lockers is that delivery can be cheaper and quicker than to your home or place of work, with the added convenience of picking it up when you want. So my regular Amazon purchases (i.e. not Marketplace) now go to the locker. Collect+ is also an option with Amazon, but carries a higher delivery charge.

Collect+ is the cheapest way of getting stuff from Very, though.

I checked out my local Doddle the other day as it had just opened and they said that receiving parcels is free, for now.