Royal Mail Out of Home Service for the New Checkout
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Chris
Alternative delivery options have always been a thing but RMs "Out of Home" services adds 1,200 Royal Mail Customer Service points, 1,200 Parcel Lockers, 6,400 Collect+ stores, 11,500 Post Office branches, 1,200 Parcel Postboxes... much better than the log shed or front door step.
This could massively help conversions as customers could collect their parcels locally at their convenience, rather than wait in or take the day off work.
Could this please be considered for the new checkout? Please. I imagine most of us in the UK make use of Royal Mail Services
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Yes we'll certainly look into these kind of services, we've also been talking to InPost. One thing which makes this less likely to be developed is that we already support DPD Pickup, which provides thousands of collection locations, but only a handful of our customers use it, so there has not been much demand for drop off location services from our customer base. That said it definitely drives conversion I was talking to Tom the MD of Working Class Heroes and about 20% of his DPD orders go via DPD pickup, its nearly a £1 per parcel in terms of costs from DPD compared to next day delivery to the home as well.
If you use DPD as a courier, I can have someone contact you and provide details, there is a per parcel fee from Citrus-Lime, but that would fall if more customers used the service.
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Chris
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime we'd be interested in this with dpd.
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Chris
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime could it be that not everyone has a dpd account or that they're unaware of the service and how to set it up on ship.citrus
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Chris We're sending out some information to our customer base in the next few days, the same thought occurred to us.
I'll ask someone to get intouch about DPD pickup on your account.
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Mark Rose
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime Hi Neil, We'd be very keen to get the RM out of home integrated and initiated the InPost discussion. We have also been trying to get DPD pickup activated for some weeks - it has been configured in exactly the same way as WCH and activated in our DPD account but it currently errors when consigning/attempting to print labels - your support team are looking into, but DPD aren't really that helpful. For anyone else reading this - it is not set up or controlled by settings in ship.citrus lime. Normal weight and geo restrictions, and price settings do not apply. When you (by that I mean CL, as you have no control) turn it on, all items on your site are eligible by default to all locations - if you sell big box products that are over DPD limits you will need to identify and block these items on the item cards (wizard or turboMT) and remember to do this for any new items you create. :-)
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Mark Rose We are certainly interested in developing further in this area, we have a few retailers using DPD Pickup and it definitely helps conversion rates, it can be upto 20% of the DPD volume, if we can get some retailer using Pickup via the service we already support we'll look to add more pickup services. RM and Inpost would be my first thoughts as to ones to target.
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Mark Rose
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime Thanks Neil, we are definitely on board for this one!
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Mark Rose thank you, we believe this area needs investment but historic customer demand has been very low, if we can get people using DPD Pickup we can build the investment case. We onboarded a new retailer last week, and it worked, so the issue on your account is inside your DPD account which is frustrating.
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Peter Carol
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime I did follow up on the DPD email, but have now been reminded we kept getting nothing to collect charges when DPD failed to turn up. Could be because it's a Rural area, but £10 at least once a week was one of the reasons we dropped DPD. However we have no problems with Royalmail and they have lots of places they can deliver to, so we'd be really happy if that happened.
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Steven Sproat
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime Hi Neil,
"if we can get people using DPD Pickup we can build the investment case."
-> but is it not possible that it's not the
delivery click & collect
element here, but rather the courier? We use RM, not DPD but it seems backwards to have to start using DPD's services in order to make a use case for going forwards with the RM integation based on the uptake with DPDNeil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Steven Sproat There are a lot of DPD users in our customer base so we should be able to see if there is demand.
I do take your point that if I was starting from scratch with this development we'd likely pick RM as I'll guess 100% of our retailers have an RM account.
We sunk a lot of R&D costs into DPD pickup but its rarely used even by those with a DPD account. As DPD pickup is cheaper than DPD home deliveries for the customer base, and it increases conversion rates this does not make sense to me. I'm trying to see if there is demand for drop off services in our client base prior to signing off further R&D spend.
I suspect to date its failed because:
- In the pandemic drop off locations ran out of space and started refusing new deliveries so retailers started cancelling the service, this was point in time issue which won't now apply
- Citrus-Lime due to the above have stopped talking about the service.
Hopefully this post and our efforts to talk about it some more might drive takeup. In your case, it might be worth using DPD for a while, taking the extra sales revenue, and then moving to another provider as we expand our offering, or if you don't want a DPD account taking a watching brief.