Ask HN: UK parcel delivery service prime for disruption?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 ;-)

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?

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.

Yep, I don't doubt it varies with employee nature and workload. My beef is with the company's standards.

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?

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.

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.

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!

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.

Pizza deliveries are all basically that last-mile, you're not normally ordering a pizza from another city/country.

That means the company has lots of individual restaurants with their own delivery operations (guys on bikes) who handle that last mile on an individual basis, or maybe doing a couple of pizzas at a time.

If you've ordered a pizza, then you're also pretty much guaranteed to be at home. There's not much point leaving a note saying your pizza was taken back to the depot or left with your neighbour!

It's a whole different problem when the range of possible delivery addresses is within a square mile.

There are, or nearly, I don't recall their name offhand but my bank has used them to get a card to me. I never needed your point 2, but point 3, they said on the phone, where are you, we'll come find you, and the courier just wanted to see my passport before handing it over.

I don't doubt they cost considerably more than Amazon delivery costs (GBP 49/year for unlimited deliveries to any address in my address book). Ultimately there's nothing I buy online that I care that much about that I can't wait a few days for Amazon to re-send it and hopefully randomly choose someone who isn't HDNL or Citylink.

> 2. SMS upon delivery failure or address confusion.

Amazon actually just started offering SMS upon delivery failure/success, at least in the US.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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."

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.

When I was living in the UK (York, later London), DHL regularly failed to deliver stuff. Once they even claimed my address didn't exist.

Not that it's much better here (Vienna), TNT, GLS and DHL tend to display "out for delivery" on the tracking site multiple days in a row, prompting me to stay in all day, yet no delivery (with some excuse on the tracking info, and no slip in the letterbox). They of course do finally turn up when I'm out at the supermarket after running out of food. My theory is we're located at the end of their run, so if they don't complete it by the time they feel they want to go home, they just make something up.

The Austrian post is even worse. For some reason amazon tend not to show the tracking number for items sent by post even though they have one. I've had orders which hadn't turned up 8-9 days after the shipping notification; after a bit of back and forth amazon revealed the tracking info, which I then took to the local post office along with ID. The parcel was there and one day from being sent back. As if to mock me, the next day there was a "you were out" slip in the letterbox for the same parcel.

One upside of living here: I once had a box of RAM sitting on my doorstep untouched for a week or so - I'd received no dispatch notification and went on holiday, expecting to come back to a delivery failure slip. (I'd ordered it a week earlier, when it was "in stock for next day dispatch" - not amazon though)

Fun thing how that is completely the opposite for me (7th district in Vienna) - the Austrian postal service is most reliable - always arriving 8am straight. GLS/DHL/TNT vary, depending on the driver.

I'm at the outer edges of the 14th, so when they do manage to deliver it tends to be in the afternoon.

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...

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?

Its odd because this happened once out of the 6 times since march. Very useful when it works - but unfortunately very inconsistent.

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).

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 :)

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

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.

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

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.