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Amazon Expanding Delivery Locker Service
An anonymous reader writes "The WSJ reports that Amazon's new secret weapon in its fight against other retailers is its delivery locker service. Dropping a package at a customer's door is not particularly secure, so Amazon Lockers were introduced about a year ago to provide a secure location for customers to retrieve their shipments. Now, Amazon is ramping up the service, opening new sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. From the article: 'Users don't pay extra to use the service but the locker program helps Amazon save on certain shipping costs. ShopRunner's Ms. Dias said UPS and FedEx Corp. FDX 0.00% charge retailers as much as 20% more to deliver packages to residential addresses because it is more efficient to deliver multiple packages to a business address. Failed deliveries are also more expensive for online retailers because those consumers are more likely to call customer service, switch to a competitor, or get a replacement item.'"
Uh... nice... I'd just as soon see FedEX and UPS do something similar. That said, I would prefer any option to waiting for Lasership to get their heads out of their asses. If you have not heard of Lasership, consider yourself lucky.
In Germany we have a similar but general system called "Packstation" (package station). Everybody can get an access code and everybody and every company can send a package to any Packstation in the country (there's one for every 50.000 to 100.000 people). You can get automated round-the-clock access via electronic card and a pin-code.
You can also drop off packages. You get an email and sms when a package for you arrived. All in all, pretty nifty system.
And it doesn't cost a cent more than having it delivered to your house.
Luckily I've never had a problem with stoop theft though.
Here in the uk, I think it would make more sense to partner with ocado.com or one of the supermarkets. They deliver in one-hour slots so theyre reliable and usage rates are prettty high. A "deliver with my next ocado" button would see a lot of usage, I'm sure.
At least for the kind of books I order, the book depository is practically always cheaper and delivery is free.
When there is Amazon Yesterday shipping! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA_gwzx39LQ
If it costs 20% more to deliver to a residential address, then one strategy brick and mortar retailers can use to save on shipping is to allow people to pick up their shipments at the store. This would have the added benefit of getting more people into the stores. A customer could order tonight and pick up their order tomorrow or the day after at a convenient location.
It's not quite as convenient as home delivery, but at least you don't have to run around to different stores and hope they have what you're looking for.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Where we could keep consumer goods until they're ready to buy them. They'd just visit the storage, decide what they want to buy, purchase it, and take it straight away. I think it could do big business. Central storage may be too wordy, so perhaps we could just abbreviate it to "storage" or maybe just "store." Visit the Amazon Store!
Just before Webvan tanked, they were playing around with a similar concept. In the Webvan system, the lockers were refrigerated, since they were delivering food. The concept was to have locker rooms in large apartment buildings in big cities, so you could order food and have it ready for you when you got home. Great idea for NYC and London, where people try to carry groceries on the subway or are stuck shopping at overpriced local shops with small selections.
Webvan is back. It's now owned by Amazon. They don't do perishables, and delivery takes 2-3 days, but you can order about 45,000 food-related products. Amazon plans to grow that business.
This could wipe many more retailers off the face of the earth. If the delivery density is high enough, delivery is cheaper that driving a 2-ton SUV to a mall for 20 pounds of groceries.
The next thing Amazon needs to do is leverage these pickup locations into payment locations. At that point they will be able to do what wal-mart started doing earlier this year and accept cash for online purchases.
It would be nice if they did a better job than wal-mart and instead of requiring photo-id to pick-up a cash purchase, they will just give you a receipt that can be exchanged for the product when it comes in, regardless of who holds the receipt.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Congratulations Amazon. You've just invented the post office.
This sounds similar to Collect + which Amazon (in the UK anyway) uses:
http://tamebay.com/2012/07/collect-plus-1st-carrier-on-ebay-amazon.html
http://www.collectplus.co.uk/label/howToReturn.php?retailer=Amazon
This will increase credit card fraud. The destination address is now effectively anonymous.
In Oz, Air Express couriers will deliver to post offices and PO boxes. Australia Post are trialing the locker delivery system as well, but at the moment there aren't enough sites to make it very useful.
For anyone building a new home, maybe they should think about putting in an externally accessible lock box as part of the design? Use a combination lock that could be changed for every new delivery. I have found waiting around the house for deliveries that never seem to come when promised to be a right pain.
Currently there is such as service in Taiwan already. One can order books from a major local retailer, and then pick them up next day from their local 7-11 outlet. And with those shops available virtually everywhere (including smaller villages) that makes for a huge network of "package lockers".
Theres one in a 7/11 by my house (in seattle), and I was wondering what it was for. It looks like a giant locker with a touch screen on it. sounds like a good idea to be expanding it.
> UPS and FedEx Corp. charge retailers as much as 20% more to deliver packages to residential addresses
I live in a residential area and Amazon has started using some off-brand low-rent delivery service called "Laser Ship". Packages arrive several days late (7 days to get Prime deliveries? No thanks.) if at all, and are delivered by plainsclothes folks in unmarked cars. They rarely leave notes, or attempt delivery to a neighbor.
I appreciate Amazon's need to lower delivery costs but to risk their entire brand and image by outsourcing the final leg of the fulfilment process to, essentially, civilians for whom this is just a day gig - I don't get it.
I didn't think I could live without Amazon, but I am finding that there are deals to be had elsewhere; also, the "one stop shopping" is missed but often the other, more-specialized stores have greater selection and competitive prices.
I used one of the UK storage lockers last week and was impressed with how easy it was. You arrive and enter the code onto a touchscreen and the locker opens. Done.
The only downside is that in the UK you can't get free postage to a locker whereas you can to your home address.
"If only there were a way to make that happen..."
See Michael Kay's work: http://www.ise.ncsu.edu/kay/pln/index.htm
"A public logistics network is proposed as an alternative to private logistics networks for the ground transport of parcels. Using the analogy between the packages transported in the network and the packets transmitted through the Internet, a package in a public logistics network could, for example, be sent from a retail store and then routed through a sequence of public distribution centers (DCs) located throughout the metropolitan area and then delivered to a customer's home in a matter of hours, making a car trip to the store to get the package unnecessary. The DCs in the network, functioning like the routers in the Internet, could also be located at major highway interchanges for longer distance transport.
Currently, it is common for a single logistics firm like UPS and FedEx to handle a package throughout its transport. The such a private logistics network, much of the technology used to coordinate the operation of the network is proprietary. As a result, the principal competitive advantage that a private logistics company has is the barrier to entry due to the very large scale of operation (national or international) required in order to be able to underwrite the development of private facilities and propriety technologies. Nevertheless, a single firm, unless it becomes a monopoly, is ultimately limited in the scale of its operation, resulting in the use of a limited number of large-scale hub transshipment points that can result in packages making many circuitous hops before reaching their destinations. In a public logistics network, the different functions of the network would be separated so that a single firm is not required for coordination. This would enable scale economies to be realized in performing each logistics function since each element of the network has access to potentially all of the network's demand. The increase in scale would make it economical to have many more transshipment points. Each transshipment point, or distribution center (DC), could be an independently operated facility that serves as both a freight terminal and a public warehouse, and could be established in small cities and towns that would never have such facilities if they were served as part of a proprietary, private logistics network."
I liked your point in general. Presumably these front-door codes (or a home delivery box with a code) coud be integrated in with a Public Logistics Network? I elaborated on that idea here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#Princeton_University_Freecycle_Transportation_Network_--_an_internet_of_physical_packages
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.