This is a good start. I have a registered code, I can update it whenever I move house, online ordering becomes easier, great.
As people have indicated in thread already, the current implementation is easy: a website frontend just needs to be able to resolve it to the physical address.
I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.
Going further, I might want to specify my home address as the default, but for items under 2kg delivered 8am to 5pm on weekdays, please deliver to my place of business. If I'm in hospital for a prolonged stay, I may want to redirect to a friend or family member.
I actually expect some of the rapid delivery networks to get a bit more like this - I predicted with friends about 5 years ago at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site. Imagine if there was dynamic routing so that the parcel just "finds me" if I'm at work, or a bar after work... obviously I might want choices and options and so on, but I think the idea of parcels just going to where you sleep, whether you are there or not, is going to look quaint in 30 years time.
[edit: there's also a nice bit of privacy going on here the later the lookup happens - if nobody at the e-commerce site knows where I actually live, that information can't be leaked]
Poland adopted parcel lockers on a massive scale, and they mostly solve that problem. It's such a good idea; I'm really surprised other countries haven't followed suit.
They're absolutely everywhere. Your tiny village might not have a grocery store, a school or an ATM, but it probably has a locker. Where my parents live (a village of ~2000 people), they have three. The vast majority of people have at least one in walking distance.
Before they became so popular, we used to do sign-on-delivery, leaving mail on your doorstep didn't become a thing here until covid. This made mail much harder to steal, but required you either to have somebody who would stay home all day, or to hunt down which neighbor got your package for you.
Yes I agree with you, I don't understand why parcel lockers are not completely replacing delivery.
I saw on youtube that China has "open stores" where you go pick on shelf your parcel, all controlled via camera and face recognition.
In my country France the number of parcel lockers is going up but there's often sellers who don't propose them, or have some restrictions.
The amazon lockers work fairly well (and I often use them when traveling to avoid the headache of trying to ship something to a hotel.) But I have to say, I don't really understand why you feel they're game changing. You mention that parcel lockers "mostly solve that problem", but I don't really see how they solve any problems in the GP comment. For example, I don't see how they solve the problem of "I want to order something that will arrive in 6 months but I might move between now and then". (won't your package just go to a locker that's possibly very far away from you now?) It feels to me like the main problem lockers solve is preventing mail theft.
The lockers in Poland can be used for both receiving and sending items. It's a massive QoL improvement in many ways over old school:
- you can receive things while you're not at home, don't have to carefully plan to be there for the courier (who then misses initial date and you need to do it again next day). It works 24/7 so you can pick up your stuff in the middle of the night if it's more convenient. You have 48hrs to pick up.
- you can send things, also 24/7, so no need to go to a blessed place between 9am and 5pm during week and queue. You can send your item Sunday evening, no problem
- the costs are also very reasonable. I sent a parcel from Poland to France for 7€ this month.
- you don't actually need to print anything nor even write the address. The courier opens the box, and they print a sticker with destination address.
- I believe it increases throughput because the courier doesn't have to stop at 100 places per day, they stop at lockers and unload N packages at once in every locker. Higher throughput -> shorter delivery times and lower costs
I am not going to repeat the existing comments, instead I will point out something obvious.
Parcel lockers are only really good for small and light items.
The moment you get into heavy or bulky or both then parcel lockers are a waste of time.
Who wants to go to a parcel locker and haul a 16kg package back home ?
Or if you have multiple deliveries, who wants to go to a parcel locker and haul 10 boxes home ?
I think this new Japanese "follow-me" system is genuinely a much better idea. Parcel lockers are yesteday's technology in comparison.
How does the "follow-me" solve heavy delivery?
Heavy deliveries will always be a problem. It existing doesn't invalidate usefulness of things that solve light delivery.
Really heavy deliveries will be. A system that lets you specify a certain weight cutoff for location to deliver might be useful, but even then sheer quantities can be an issue.
I get anything valuable coming from a major delivery service (DHL, FedEx, UPS, US Postal Service) sent to my office. They're already stopping there (it's a hospital with plenty of doctors' offices in their attached tower, lots of stuff is delivered daily), someone can sign for it and lock it up. I have a key to get into my office whenever I need to, and if it's during the day I can borrow a cart or a dolly/hand truck to take it to my car. Can usually rustle up a spare cart even in the off hours. Done it for almost 20 years.
If it's a TV or something else large (appliances, furniture, etc.), it's going to be a custom delivery anyway, so I'll pick a time that I know I'll be home.
> Parcel lockers are yesteday's technology in comparison.
They're still wonderful for small deliveries, which are maybe 95% of everything I order. You can even redirect them or reschedule them easily, since a lot of it is based on web based systems that you can access with the code they send you and additional verification.
I actually had my computer case ship to a pickup point instead of a locker near me, so I could just go there when I had free time after work and haul it back to my apartment in the city (was like a 10-15 minute walk). It ended up being cheaper than getting it delivered to my door and was functionally identical to a package locker, just with a person verifying the code and giving me the larger item. It seems like some of those locations are in convenience stores, others in gas stations over here, a bit more relaxed than traditional delivery, for which I have to be present at a time I don't know exactly.
For the big items (such as a ladder, or a lawnmower or something for the countryside, or new fridge or stove for the apartment), there is still courier delivery, which brings it to your door, or can help you carry it upstairs if needed, though obviously more expensive and not worth it for anything but the bigger items.
I think all of those methods compliment each other nicely. No reason to scoff at one method if it helps others be more efficient: split up the load, less awkward logistics of the courier needing to talk with each individual recipient to make sure they'll be there in like 15 minutes after the call, but instead being able to take a lot of the less expensive small packages and just put them in the locker and letting the people sort the rest out themselves, handling a bunch of those packages in one go.
I even shipped my old GPU to some friends across the EU with DPD and the process was similarly simple - I just prepped the order online, put the info sheet on the package and put it in the package machine. They received the GPU a few days later. Fewer queues than a postal office.
I’m familiar with postal services both in Poland and Japan and I like the Japanese solution even more - most of the new buildings have package lockers operated by the building owner and independent from the delivery service. Everyone could put the packages there and my building would notify me about a waiting package when I entered.
> You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site.
That sounds terrible from just about every perspective. What about people who work during that 30 minutes? Or who have mobility concerns? What about a parent who's young child just fell asleep? Should they all have to go to the pickup site? And let's not kid ourselves, it's not going to be nearby. Especially if you live in a rural area. And how do you open the locker when you get there? Do you need another app that tracks your every movement? No thank you, please just leave the package at my door.
I am not sure about your particular area, but all those concerns have been solved for me. If I get package in my local mailbox (which is always nearby), I get a key to the delivery box dropped into my mail box. If the package doesnt fit there, I get message like "box 5 code 123456" if it is at self pickup site, or I go to the post office - which are both 5 minutes drive, but for box of such size I would need to drive even to my local mailbox.
I will prefer any of those options over my package having to sit in the rain or on the snow.
I'm familiar with apartments and trailer parks, and from experience I can tell you it's a worse system than just delivering door to door.
I tend to agree. As I understand it it's the final mile that balloons the cost and in my view a neighborhood collections box is just a micro-optimization. Same with mass dropoff box truck. You're already driving a vehicle with my package nearby just deliver it at that point.
What I want is cheaper shipping if they drop it off at a post office or something. For example on Amazon I see it as an option but only ever as a "carbon-reduction" vs just delivering to my front door. I know it's cheaper - pass on those savings to me.
The irony is that in many cases, it'd take less carbon for them to deliver to your front door than it would for you to get to the post office -- if they're already delivering to someone else near you, their extra distance traveled might be a block or so (or 0 if they were going to drive past your house anyway).
For delivery-to-post-office to be more carbon-efficient than them delivering to your house, the inequality (additional distance you need to travel to get to post office / your mpg) < (additional distance they need to travel to get to your house / their mpg) must be true. If you were gonna drive past the post office anyway, or your vehicle is significantly more efficient than their delivery van, then it might pencil out. If you're making an extra trip, it probably doesn't make sense.
> No thank you, please just leave the package at my door.
With where I live now, yes. I've had a previous address with about a 15% package-theft rate within the first 2 hours of package delivery. In this situation I started to use lockers instead of straight to home.
I think this type of delivery system (mobile lockers to stationary lockers) would be a hit in areas with high levels of package theft.
Or the police could deal with package theft.
>And how do you open the locker when you get there? Do you need another app that tracks your every movement?
You enter the code from sms, that's it.
> I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.
The downside for carriers is that costs are unpredictable. Will they be shipping it a few miles or to the other side of the country?
The downside for the person ordering is that there is a race condition that makes it difficult for you to know where the thing will get delivered to. Perhaps you changed your location two days ago, and you are expecting a piece of furniture sometime soon. Did the furniture delivery process kick off before or after you changed your address?
>I actually expect some of the rapid delivery networks to get a bit more like this - I predicted with friends about 5 years ago at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site. Imagine if there was dynamic routing so that the parcel just "finds me" if I'm at work, or a bar after work... obviously I might want choices and options and so on, but I think the idea of parcels just going to where you sleep, whether you are there or not, is going to look quaint in 30 years time.
Inpost - logistics startup in Poland managed to put lockers everywhere and you just receive sms when the parcel is there and you have 48h to pick it up
You can go whenever you want - simple and effective as hell
They disrupted delivery industry
For me the privacy part of site not knowing we’re I live would be great.
I could also black list entities from delivering spam.
My mailbox is full of junk mail and it’s hard to make them stop. It’s not even addressed to me, just the mailbox location. The design pattern to “unsubscribe” or block the junk sender is also useless. Surely there must be a strong political lobby in the US who don’t want to prevent junk mail. It’s so wasteful and ridiculous (literally tons of paper) and I’ve resigned to this fact of life in my country.
Marketing mail is a significant (maybe 25%) portion of the USPS revenue and very profitable. They have a strong disincentive to reduce the stream of junk mail going to your home.
What stops them from sending the spam to the same code?
> at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes
I'm reminded of the Taipei refuse trucks that play Fur Elise to remind you that it's the five-minute window in which you can put your bins in the street.
I'm not very optimistic about delivery improving, because it's a three-sided market. You don't get to choose which courier the sender uses, but you're really their customer.
Not having your address passed around 3rd-party sellers is a win on its own
This seems worse for that though, now they can track you better when you move and correlate with your identity better.
But they could look up your physical address and store and sell that easily as storing and selling your delivery address now.
The third-party seller never gets your address. They hand the package over to the delivery company with a code, the delivery company is the only one who knows what that code means. Japanese delivery companies already offer this service, since a lot of people don't like to publish their address.
> I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.
Around here the Post already knows how to do this (I assume it's similar elsewhere), it's also used for government-related matters. But I guess other carriers do not.
I expect the overall results to be negative soon enough though : consider the issues USians have to endure with how (ab)used is their Social Security Number.
It's funny how you have a Social Security Number used for everything except provide you with actual social security.