

Ask HN: UK parcel delivery service prime for disruption? - binarymax

Backstory: I've just lost a 3rd undelivered parcel from Amazon/HDNL in as many months.  No idea where it is.  Amazon will end up refunding my money (for the 3rd time) and HDNL will take a loss (for the 3rd time).  I work from home, nobody ever rang my bell or put a missed delivery card through my slot.  FWIW I have no mysterious address and am easy to find.  I work from home and am always available to collect my deliveries.  HDNL has successfully delivered 3 out of 6 orders since March 2010.  Related - Royal Mail doesn't even bother to ring my bell, so I need to hike up to the sorting office 4 miles away by taxi.  Looking for a way to vent I found this: http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews-all-150787.html
&#60;/rant&#62;<p>Punchline:  I am tired of this nonsense.  Does anyone know of any startups who could finally provide a reliable parcel delivery service in the UK?  I'm no supply chain engineer but I am thinking something like ubercab for parcel delivery.<p>If anyone can recommend an alternate and reliable service, please do! Also feel free to vent your similar experiences :)
======
samstokes
Shutl (<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.

~~~
smokinn
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.

------
frou_dh
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
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
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
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?

------
gabrielroth
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
_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
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
_You, the person waiting for your package at home, are not the customer._ This
is a good wake-up call that I had not considered. The suggestion by samstokes
above for Shutl seems quite interesting, hopefully it is viable.

Also it is strange to me that a pizza is delivered 100% of the time yet a
package success rate is much less - they seem to have the last-mile problem
solved. Maybe all HDNL and the like need to do is pick up the damn phone when
they can't deliver!

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
As others replied, it's much easier for pizza because the delivery area is so
small. Usually.

I'm an example of an outlier; I live in a rural area and if I go to Domino's
website, there is no delivery to my house. However, I know that if I call the
local Domino's that's 10 miles away, they will deliver. Problem is that there
is a high rate of phone calls from drivers that say "I'm lost," "Your house
isn't where they said it was," "Are you sure you live on xxx st? I drove from
one end to the other and the address doesn't exist." I've learned to keep my
phone near me if I order pizza because I'm likely to have to give the driver
explicit instructions on how to get here.

OTOH, USPS, FedEx and UPS have absolutely no problem finding my house.

------
rg
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/>) 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>).

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.

------
thomas11
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.

------
webignition
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> 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
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...

------
ayb
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.

------
drothlis
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
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
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?

------
taphangum
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
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>

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
A rating system could work in theory. Putting it into practice would be hard
though.

------
ajb
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.

------
dav-id
Royal mail have lost 25% of my post sent to India. So I would not suggest
using Royal Mail either.

------
HNer
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.

