Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm living in Greece right now and I've been shopping online a bit more the past couple of months. I've been shopping online since 2006 and I guess at some point I forgot to notice how shit of an experience it is.

So in the past couple of months, I have RMA'd two items, returned one due to bad fulfillment, returned one more because I didn't like what I bought (and that got lost). Of all the items I ordered, one got lost or stolen, two more I had to pick up at the local PO which cost me a total of ~20USD in taxi fares (and several hours wasted waiting in line), one I had to pick up in the central depot which cost me 50USD in taxi fares just for that day (and again, several hours wasted).

Only one of those packages had free delivery because they all have to hop between the US, China, Denmark, Germany and who knows where else. (The only one I got free delivery on was a CODE keyboard, which costs $250 in Europe, vs. $130 in USA). So I'm actually paying for this ostensibly terrible service.

So I'm looking at the hub and I just think "Wow, that solves a lot of problems outside the US".

And it's US only.

Of course it is.

> And it's US only.

There are already competitors operating here in Canada doing this stuff fortunately. I believe Amazon acquired one of them which turned into this [nm, see edit]. That should hopefully pressure Amazon to expand and this will offer tons of free advertising for those smaller companies competing.

Edit: turns out it was Buffer Box and they were acquired by Google and (of course) shut down https://www.wikiwand.com/en/BufferBox

InPost is another one with boxes all over Europe. They recently shut down in my city though :/ (Toronto). But otherwise it looks pretty like they have extensive deployment: https://inpost24.com/

Germany has DHL Packstation: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Packstation

Also two startups: https://wefunder.com/swapbox and http://www.ucella.com/

For the longest time, Buffer box had one location: inside the Google Waterloo office.

Australia has Parcel Lockers run by the post office for free - they are pretty good https://auspost.com.au/parcels-mail/parcel-collection-delive...

But only for packages which are delivered through AusPost. Which if you buy stuff internationally, it mostly isn't.

Also, not in a ton of locations.

IDK, the vast majority of my international purchases have been delivered by AusPost - it's actually domestic PC parts shops and eBay sellers that I have the most problems with as a lot of them choose to use companies like Fastway and don't make it clear on their websites who they ship with.

I've had four Amazon packages delivered to Parcel Lockers in the last two months.

I dont think so, I've had everything delivered there and never had an issue. My only exception is if its something where they say no po box - then I havent tried.

It's the same situation here in Lithuania - various companies have these lockers but it's hit or miss who an international package will be delivered by. Even from Amazon I've had packages delivered by DHL, UPS and regular mail.

The post office will give you a forwarding address (for regular mail) that will end up in the locker of your choosing, but you then have to pay €x/package, and the lockers are usually at post offices, so it's not really worth it.

The Packstation of DHL is great. What also DP/DHL did, is to make every little shop a micro-postoffice. Probably gave them some incentives, but it works great if you are not at home, you can be sure your package is at the store max 5 mins from you

The public post office in Cyprus [0] has 3 of those machines (1 for each big city).

SMSes get sent to you as notification, and you have 3-4 days to pick it up. After that (and a second notification), it gets sent to your local post office and a delivery note is sent to your house.

No charges yet for the service, though they have been toying with the idea ever since it launched a few years ago. No charges for packages not getting delivered either.

[0] http://www.mcw.gov.cy/mcw/dps/dps.nsf/page25_en/page25_en?Op...

InPost is essentially useless in the UK, mind... there's essentially no retailers that support it, you can't have arbitrary packages from retailers posted to one, and I've literally never seen someone using my local InPost box to send packages. I'm assuming they're burning through investment money badly. To show how little people care about it: it doesn't even have an English-language wikipedia page.

If they could somehow have the postal service and couriers able to post things to InPost boxes, it'd be far more useful - but I suspect there's some really complicated contractual stuff that prevents that.

In the UK, PassMyParcel is good.

Your parcel get just delivered to your local NewsAgent, which in the UK generally has extensive opening times. Supported directly by Amazon and a bunch of retailer, but delivery companies use the same system (DPD, EPS).

Canada Post provides this service. My building has a parcel rack and they just put a numbered key in your mailbox when you have a parcel. No need for codes or phones.

For those who may not know, Canada's national postal service is the largest parcel carrier in Canada.

> It's only US

I think that in densely built European cities robo delivery is a much more promising technology. The first trials are already ongoing here [0]. Putting in the hubs may not make sense if the target audience doesn't want delivery vans in a few years time.

[0] https://www.starship.xyz

I literally just came back from grabbing a package at an Amazon locker in Italy (this exact concept, except it's been around for a couple of months now). It was convenient and beats the really unreliable parcel services here.

Amazon have a similar service, but installed in public spaces, called Amazon Locker. They have it at least here in Spain [0].

[0]: https://www.amazon.es/locker

In Singapore the national postal service provides this service when you can ask the parcels to be delivered to automated box and you can collect later don't know if it works with fedex or other postal service who have their own delivery guys

Reply on news.ycombinator.com