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Ask HN: UK parcel delivery service prime for disruption?

• frou_dh 16y ago
  I'm convinced that CityLink UK have lying to the public as part of their introductory training. There's so often a phantom "failed delivery attempt" instead of admission that they can't/won't hit their date. Coincidently my most recent dealing with CityLink was via Amazon Prime. When the inevitable happened, I sent a mail to Amazon to ask they cease using CityLink and cancelled the Prime trial.
  • binarymax 16y ago
    Not sure how this will format but here is my tracking log for the most recent delivery with HDNL. Calling them up is painful, and nobody has any idea... Date Time Location Event Details 4 Nov 2010 05:51:01 PM Newhaven Depot UK Arrival Scan 4 Nov 2010 01:07:05 PM Newhaven Van UK Delivery attempted 4 Nov 2010 08:14:36 AM Newhaven Van UK Out for delivery 3 Nov 2010 06:19:58 PM Newhaven Depot UK Arrival Scan 3 Nov 2010 03:50:46 PM Newhaven Van UK Delivery attempted 3 Nov 2010 09:29:13 AM Newhaven Van UK Out for delivery 1 Nov 2010 04:02:18 PM Newhaven Depot UK Arrival Scan 1 Nov 2010 10:29:54 AM Newhaven Van UK Delivery attempted 1 Nov 2010 08:50:27 AM Newhaven Van UK Out for delivery 1 Nov 2010 05:26:32 AM Newhaven Depot UK Arrival Scan 31 Oct 2010 10:41:31 PM Droitwich UK Arrival Scan 31 Oct 2010 12:00:00 AM Web Customer UK Order has been handed over to the carrier and is in transit The funny thing is that I live about 1.5 hours from Newhaven!
    • frou_dh 16y ago
      I wish goods could be teleported to the buyer! I've often thought that it's a shame that the awesome virtual convenience of web commerce has to hit the sucky reality of transit and delivery ;-)
      • binarymax 16y ago
        A realtime tracking service would do! I bet half the drivers have their own iphone or android anyway. How many failed deliveries does it take to offset the cost of the mobile/data services for their drivers?
  • nam3d 16y ago
    See, my local CityLink guy is great. When I'm not in he'll either go out of his way to leave it with the neighbour, call back with my parcel later on in the evening or on one occasion delivered it to my office.
    • frou_dh 16y ago
      Yep, I don't doubt it varies with employee nature and workload. My beef is with the company's standards.
• HNer 16y ago
  citi link were the best when I used them, we sent out over 1 million GBP of stock per year. zero problems, all other companies were loosing stuff all the time.
• drothlis 16y ago
  Yes, very frustrating. HDNL has only successfully delivered me 1 package out of 3 this year. Have had no trouble with Royal Mail. I no longer use Amazon, until they offer the choice not to use HDNL. Amazon's statement on the matter: "Currently, we do not have the ability to assign certain carriers to a specific customer or address but will continue working with all of our carriers to drive improvements for our customers."
  • andyking 16y ago
    HDNL are brilliant. I ordered something from Amazon last week and wasn't in when it was delivered. A card was duly popped through my letterbox to say the item had been left in a "safe place" - my grey wheelie bin, on bin collection day...
    • rlivsey 16y ago
      They did a similar thing to me the other week. Their idea of a safe place was on my doorstep, in plain view of the street. Needless to say it wasn't there when I looked. As others have mentioned, the really annoying thing here was that I was working from home at the time and they didn't ring the bell. Surely it's less effort to ring the doorbell than it is to write out a card?
    • binarymax 16y ago
      Its odd because this happened once out of the 6 times since march. Very useful when it works - but unfortunately very inconsistent.
  • electromagnetic 16y ago
    When I still lived in the UK I was getting deliveries from Amazon through FedEx and DHL. FedEx was god awful shitty, I never got a single delivery every one was a missed delivery card, yet I'd get the card at like 2-3pm saying I missed the delivery at 11am. After regular complaints to FedEx and Amazon the service switched to DHL and I never once got a missed delivery slip mysteriously posted without a delivery attempt even made.
• ajb 16y ago
  Starting a parcel delivery company may be hard. Many people get round the problem by having stuff delivered to work. So, target people who can't do that, but use the same method: start a website where people can offer to accept deliveries locally to you. You nearby pub, old people's home, anywhere that is open all day. I'm not sure what the business model would be, though.
• webignition 16y ago
  HDNL as an organisation is terrible. Calling the only officially published HDNL number doesn't really help in getting a package delivered. HDNL staff working at depots are far enough removed from the management chain that their interests are more closely aligned with the recipient - you want your package, they want to offload it and re-deliveries are a real hassle for them. Looking up HDNL on http://www.saynoto0870.com http://www.saynoto0870.com and calling your nearest depot will get you through to a non-corporate human. You can have the deliverer called while you hold to find out what the situation is, you may sometimes even get to speak directly to the deliverer with your package. There's a clear gap between HDNL management and HDNL delivery staff that needs fixing.
  • gaius 16y ago
    HDNL AFAIK has no actual delivery staff: all the drivers are contractors (franchisees?) who are paid 50p per package delivered. This is an obvious misalignment of incentives...
• gabrielroth 16y ago
  People have had similar problems with A1, a courier service Amazon has begun using in New York City. Last-mile delivery is a notoriously difficult market to enter, for reasons that are obvious when you think about the logistics. I think it's telling that Amazon hasn't chosen to get into it themselves. They've got a ton of cash, relevant expertise, and orders everywhere that they could use for pilot programs. One has to assume they've considered the idea and decided to keep sending money to UPS et al. What would a startup do that they couldn't?
  • binarymax 16y ago
    What would a startup do that they couldn't? Please correct me if I am wrong, but there are no domestic delivery services that offer: 1. Realtime tracking. 2. SMS upon delivery failure or address confusion. 3. Deliver to you not to your home. #3 is probably hard, but 1 & 2 should be fairly straightforward.
    • gabrielroth 16y ago
      When I wrote 'What would a startup do that they couldn't?' I wasn't asking 'What services would a startup provide for end-customers that aren't provided by existing couriers?' I was asking 'How would a startup make a profit in this hard-to-enter market when Amazon, with all its advantages, has apparently decided it can't?' Do you think Amazon couldn't provide realtime tracking or SMS notification? Those things are frills. They'd be nice. Maybe a few end-customers would pay slightly more for them. But they don't help you with the real problem, which is setting up a hub-and-spoke delivery network that's fine-grained enough to get a package from a central warehouse to any individual house in the country within three days for less than five bucks. You, the person waiting for your package at home, are not the customer. The customer is Amazon. What the customer wants is delivery that's sufficiently reliable that it doesn't cost them business, and sufficiently cheap that it doesn't interfere with their efforts to undersell traditional retailers. Can you make them a viable offer on those grounds? If not, SMS notifications aren't going to change their mind.
      • binarymax 16y ago
• samstokes 16y ago
  Shutl (http://shutl.co.uk/ http://shutl.co.uk/) is one startup trying to shake up this market. I believe their trick is to aggregate the spare capacity of multiple same-day couriers. They claim they can offer delivery in 90 minutes, or delivery during a specific hour instead of "between 8am and 8pm, probably", at a cost comparable to standard single-courier delivery. Their marketing right now seems to be targeted at retailers rather than consumers, since they have to get retailers to use them as a delivery option before consumers will care. Really hope these guys can deliver (badoom-tssshhh) on their promise.
  • buro9 16y ago
    That's awesome. Does anyone know if they partner with distribution centres? Basically I'm looking for 3 pieces of a puzzle: 1) A shopping cart solution that ties into distribution. 2) Distribution centres that take my stock and manage dispatching it. 3) Delivery services that will remove the pain for the customer (Shutl looks good). The middle bit seems important as it needs to work with both the shopping cart and stock control system as well as the delivery service.
  • smokinn 16y ago
    Shutl seems to be in an interesting position to expand into what I thought was an obvious idea but logistical nightmare to actually execute: Why don't delivery companies sign deals with Dominoes/Pizza Hut/other big pizza chains and use their excess delivery capacity to do package delivery? If Shutl is taking care of distributed multiple-company delivery maybe that's something they can expand into.
• taphangum 16y ago
  High Cost + Low Margins = No disruption any time soon. The ubercab for parcel delivery service could work. But only if the margins get better doing it that way You'd also need to get over the trust issues involved. I 'trust' that Royal Mail won't open my shit when they deliver it to me (when it actually comes).
  • binarymax 16y ago
    Very good points. I was thinking about the trust issue and it is tricky. Incentive for fencing the item(s) must be lower than incentive for delivery. Things like this comes to mind: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1848278 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1848278 Might have to cap the cost of the items you can deliver to something like £200 Also if you knew what driver last had the package, and it was never delivered, then some sort of punishment happens. Works in theory but there is lots I am probably not thinking of :)
    • taphangum 16y ago
      A rating system could work in theory. Putting it into practice would be hard though.
• thomas11 16y ago
  I don't get why no one offers the option of no delivery - that is, just keep the parcel at the post office nearest to me, and drop the notification in my mailbox. Better yet, notify me per SMS or email so I can pick it up on the day it got there. That should be significantly cheaper. People who work outside of their home are never there to accept the delivery anyway and end up getting it from the post office, but after having paid for the attempted delivery.
• ayb 16y ago
  Having lived in London for 2 years (2003-2005) we were very frustrated with parcel delivery. The Royal Mail was pretty good as the doorman at our building held packages for us, but other services such as DHL were hit or miss as they largely used independent contractors etc. That said, a "reliable parcel delivery service in the UK" would be hard to do unless you first start with portions of the UK and not everything. There are quite a few locales in the north that are quite out there and difficult to get to, some requiring one or more ferries etc. Not saying it can't be done, just not sure if it can be done without substantial investment.
• dav-id 16y ago
  Royal mail have lost 25% of my post sent to India. So I would not suggest using Royal Mail either.
• rg 16y ago
  In the US, recently a number of small overnight delivery services have consolidated into "regional" overnight carriers, thus offering delivery areas large enough to entice large shippers without requiring national coverage. In California, for instance, there is Ontrac (http://www.ontrac.com/ http://www.ontrac.com/) which covers the six Western states, offering rates 40% below larger competitors. Amazon.com started using them last year, and has been steadily increasing usage. There are similar regional consolidations centered on New York and on Texas (http://www.ontrac.com/compprofileregionalcarriers.asp http://www.ontrac.com/compprofileregionalcarriers.asp). It appears that these were built by uniting a number of smaller local services by adding a "backbone" to them, don't know on what financial terms. London certainly has a large number of very good delivery services operating within the M25, mostly on-demand (and fairly expensive). Some of these could perhaps be consolidated similarly, and likewise in other regions. FWIW, my first-hand experience in the UK is that none of the national carriers (not even UPS and FedEx!) is nearly as good as UPS and FedEx in America; the Royal Mail is just about as bad as the wretched US Postal Service. So there is likely a business opportunity here.