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Buying things online in UK

andrewd

pfm Member
I have not lived on Brexit island for 5 years but am moving back soon.

I am curious to know if the system for receiving goods purchased online has improved since I was last there. It used to be that both Royal Mail and Couriers would attempt to deliver parcels to your home address, which is not much good if you are at work. It was then a royal hassle trying to sort out collection at a collection depot that is open inconvenient hours.

In Norway all parcels gets sent straight to the local post office without any attempt to deliver to your home address. The post offices are mostly in stores that open late, and the tracking and receipt of packages is all done on an iphone app.

How do people do it in UK now? Is the default option to have the parcels sent to your workplace? If walking to work that is not particularly convenient, especially if it is a 30kg amplifier.
 
Collect plus do a drop off and collect from service - there are a few 'corner' shops near me that offer this. Many of the more up market couriers have drop off points too.
I have my local post office as a collection point for some orders, ie from amazon.
I imagine there are many more similar options...
 
Collect plus do a drop off and collect from service - there are a few 'corner' shops near me that offer this. Many of the more up market couriers have drop off points too.
I have my local post office as a collection point for some orders, ie from amazon.
I imagine there are many more similar options...

Thanks, so you specify the address of the collection point as the delivery address?
Would you trust them for something expensive?

The nice thing about the norwegian system is that you always specify your home address as the delivery addess and it automatically gets routed to the closest post office.
 
The default delivery option is not my workplace. Ordering on eBay I use Argos, open from 8.00 to 22.00. Ordering from Hifi shops, use different couriers that can have various different options including “safe place” or neighbour or a shop.
 
There is no one size fits all system as in Norway. Some shops will allow collection from their local store. Some competing delivery services have collection from some local store options. What is available differs purchase by purchase. For example a lot of Ebay purchases have collection from a local branch of Argos as an option. That is convenient for me but when I bought an item from Argos on line they would not allow me to collect it from a branch of Argos which was the main reason I bought from them. It's a bit better now than a few years ago but I still find I have to work hard to avoid 'signed for' items being left under a hedge and 'signed for' by the delivery driver.This country does not seem to be as advanced as Norway.
 
depends on the courier postal service.

Many retailer use a service like Collect+, parcel force leave my parcels at the local post office down the bottom.of my road.

Post office still attempt to deliver and then leave at the local sorting office. I dont know if it unusual but our local sorting office is open for convenient and long hours, mon-fri 7am to 7pm, with weds open until 8pm and sat until 2pm.

Many couriers have local collection points, which makes the depot thing less of a hassle.
 
Amazon stuff gets delivered to an Amazon locker not too far from where I live - annoyingly this only applies to purchases coming directly from Amazon.

Royal Mail and Parcel Force items are left at the local sorting office provided they’re not too big.

I’ve set up my DPD account so that their deliveries are left at a local shop.

Other couriers are a pain and I try to avoid them.
 
Thanks for all the replies, seems like things are just as complicated as they used to be. I am amazed that the postal service still tries to home deliver parcels, it is such an inefficient way of doing it. The odds of the recipient being home at the exact time of delivery must be less than 5%.
 
I have not lived on Brexit island for 5 years but am moving back soon.

I am curious to know if the system for receiving goods purchased online has improved since I was last there. It used to be that both Royal Mail and Couriers would attempt to deliver parcels to your home address, which is not much good if you are at work. It was then a royal hassle trying to sort out collection at a collection depot that is open inconvenient hours.

In Norway all parcels gets sent straight to the local post office without any attempt to deliver to your home address. The post offices are mostly in stores that open late, and the tracking and receipt of packages is all done on an iphone app.

How do people do it in UK now? Is the default option to have the parcels sent to your workplace? If walking to work that is not particularly convenient, especially if it is a 30kg amplifier.
I don't see how that is better. RM will attempt delivery then leave a red slip telling where to collect if you are not in. So in UK, you get the chance to not have to collect if someone is in the house. In Norway you only get the post office. Pfft. And I wonder if delivery is about half the price of Norway. I also suspect UK has a ton more options than Norway in terms of which courier you choose.
 
Other options:
  • You can get a locker at a RM depot and have you items default to there, but this costs money. Lockers at shops are temporary space and part of the cost of order / use of system.
  • You can get installed on your house somewhere parcels of a certain size can be delivered safely. But not if you rent, live in a block of flats of an area where such boxes would be a target for robbery.
  • The more modern blocks of flat being built in city centres now have mail lockers and/or concierge services for parcels. Should you be able to live in such a place.
  • There has been an attempt to open specialist delivery shops/drop off points which will ship parcels and returns for you (the business model of some "fashion" retailers has a return rate of up to 70%) and hold ones that come in. But they have not been a success. Tried to use one that had a branch at Manchester Piccadilly station and I couldn't get an item above a certain value (c£1K camera gear) sent to a place that was not my credit/debit card address. The item was eventually left "behind the bins" by the courier for a coupe of days - much safer! Processes not yet quite aligned.
The courier model with drop-off shops is not a bad one. This is combined by running the courier app on your phone or using their website to direct parcels to the shop if you aren't going to be in. These shops however are usually on the same van run as your address - so can be close to home, but might not be convenient if you live in the suburbs but aren't often there when these shops are open. And it still usually defaults to try and drop off first, get card and organise shop second.

The other problem is that many couriers (and the cheapest) are still playing catch up with the technology to redirect and be flexible. And we have a culture that least cost is best when internet shopping, so smallest £ with "free shipping" wins, which defaults to cheapest least flexible courier. Maybe not for £10,000 worth of new loudspeakers, but for the bulk of fashion items, printer inks, trainers etc that now make up the 20% of retail sales that go via the internet. So there is no real choice of service to the customer as you get whatever courier the e-tailer has selected. [This is why I don't use Amazon anymore - you can select a service, but not a provider]

Finally - think what moving 20% of our retailing to home delivery has done to the environment. Shopping in the old style was fairly green in that efficient HGV loads of stock turned up a large purpose built retailers and were collected by individual shoppers who combined it with trips to many other retailers and often with commuting or dropping the kids off at swimming or soccer practice, limiting additional vehicle movements. Especially when city centre shopping was achieved through use of public transport.

Now we have at least a van per courier going through the same-ish routes one to three times a day to deliver less much less than optimal route combinations. Spewing diesel. Now, putting them all back on Royal Mail would probably be some kind of communism, but it would allow for optimisation and probably enough volume to support a number of different delivery options. Lots of plusses and minuses to be discussed there.

Our city designers are now looking at how you can have enough homes, commerce, competition, clean air, driverless vehicles, parks, mass transport that servers everyone and get parcels to people. In the next 10 years the projection is retail to go from 20% to 40% via internet and half the c300,000 UK shop fronts will close. Multi-use retail, homes, leisure, parcel collection, electric car hire, mass transit served development. Brownfield sites. The out of town shopping centre is now dying (Toys R Us etc), not just the High Street. How can we re-purpose some of those big shed type buildings in fairly strategic but often only accessible by car currently? "Brownfield sites" includes some quite modern buildings that just haven't got a use anymore.

Add in moving to green fuels on our road network and attempting to recycle (or better re-use and re-purpose) all the things we make and consume instead of throwing things away.

The future is coming. Again.
 
I don't see how that is better. RM will attempt delivery then leave a red slip telling where to collect if you are not in. So in UK, you get the chance to not have to collect if someone is in the house. In Norway you only get the post office. Pfft. And I wonder if delivery is about half the price of Norway. I also suspect UK has a ton more options than Norway in terms of which courier you choose.

Delivery of a 10kg package by the state postal service here is £15, about the same price as a pint! Fully tracked on your iphone and sent to a pick up location open late hours within 1-2km from your home. I think the price is quite fair, not sure what comparable prices in UK are now. Courier companies are still available but the service is slow, inconvenient and expensive. Very few retailers use them.
 
I dont think it is complicated . Loads of choice, easy to use, reasonable price and very convenient.
I'm with G&T on this one. I can choose home delivery, drop-off to a local shop or drop-off to Argos which is open until 8pm. If only more companies would use RMSD with a guaranteed delivery of 1pm the following day, life would be simpler.

As this is a hifi website, I should mention Cyrus who require me to deliver my item to my local dealer (165 miles away) who will then send it on to Cyrus as they are not prepared to accept direct returns. I then have to travel to the dealer to pick the item back up again, so I'll never buy Cyrus again. And the OP is vexed about the difficulty of local drop-offs? :rolleyes:
 


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