The Dispatch: August 2023
Doddle - Part of Blue Yonder
Technology powering collections, delivery and returns.
This month's Dispatch covers how strategies are changing at carriers and postal operators - in terms of automation, self-service and PUDO. What's more, we've also just dropped a 30-page, all-questions-answered report on parcel lockers.
Elsewhere, TikTok's fulfilment project launches in the UK, Amazon relaunches Shipping in the US, and we see the varying fortunes of European Posts in their latest results.
Combining case studies, analysis and research, Doddle's Parcel Locker guide covers essential questions parcel carriers and postal operators should be asking about parcel lockers, including where they're most effective, whether consumers really want to use them, and to what extent they can make last-mile deliveries more sustainable.
There's a significant degree of competitive advantage to be had by staying ahead of the market, testing and learning new technologies more quickly than the rest, argues Doddle's Global Sales Director Katie Langley in our latest feature for PPTI.
With the news that InPost has launched a fully-branded PUDO network in the UK to support its ambition to be the largest OOH provider in the nation, Doddle's Mike Richmond looks at why the locker giant has eased up on its previous emphasis on automation and integrating parcel lockers into PUDO.
Whether it's increasing free shipping thresholds, raising delivery subscription costs or charging for returns, retailers around the world have started to focus on optimising their first and last-mile propositions for maximum cost-effectiveness. That's a big shift from the growth-at-all-costs mentality we've seen in years prior.
Self-service automation has become a technical priority for both carriers and postal operators in the last few years, with a wide variety of solutions emerging as a result. But is it always worth starting from scratch, or is partnering the way to get a better solution?
Postal Hub Podcast host Ian Kerr interviews Roel Gevears (Professor in Last Mile Logistics at the University of Antwerp) about the potential for a government-mandated agnostic approach to parcel lockers and what it would mean for bpost and Budbee, the main locker networks in the nation.
It's not surprising that TikTok virality can convert into massive sales for even small online merchants, and it makes some sense for the platform to offer a way for those brands to fulfil orders in a way that can scale far more quickly than they could independently manage. More interesting is whether or not TikTok will be able to become a significant ecommerce platform in the coming years.
The service, which offers ground shipping to US merchants, was stopped in 2020 as Amazon focused on its first-party volume. Now it's back, allowing merchants on or off Amazon to ship items in the contiguous US within 2-5 days - utilising the USPS for full national coverage.
We discussed both unattended delivery and how carriers could make the most of user preferences through app interfaces in our roundtables earlier this year, and Royal Mail seems to have agreed with our conclusions that if unattended deliveries are going to become a new norm, more needs to be done to capture consumer consent and directions around the delivery format.
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