Polish firm Inpost launched in the UK in 2013 with 100 lockers. Earlier this year, it celebrated its 7,000th locker.
Inpost works by operating a set of lockers across a country, which work with the country’s postal service to deliver parcels to and from the lockers. Customers can then pick up or drop off the goods in their own time.
In the last year, revenue and parcel volumes have both risen by 25 per cent, to £515m and 264m parcels respectively.
While business in Poland still provides by far the majority of revenue, the UK is Inpost’s fastest growing market out of the nine it operates in – the UK market has grown by 163 per cent year on year, to 23m parcels.
The convenience of lockers
In dense city centres with apartment blocks, home delivery is time consuming and expensive. There’s also a good chance people either won’t be in when their parcel is set to be delivered, or that waiting in for a delivery will be at best an annoyance.
Inpost is on a mission to change this.
“If you think about the unit efficiency of lockers, there’s no getting away from the fact that they’re better,” Neil Kuschel, who has been UK chief executive for only six months, said.
“[They’re] convenient to the consumer, extremely cost effective to the retailer – and therefore to the consumer because they don’t have to pass on the same kind of cost – plus fast, and naturally green,” he added.
Revenue in the UK market has tripled in the last year, “on the back of the product mix, supported by rapid network expansion and logistics improvements,” Inpost said.
“There was lots of speculation about whether lockers worked or not,” Kuschel said. “Now, that speculation has been proven incorrect”.
Lockers have proven particularly popular with gen z consumers, who are much more likely to shop online than older generations due to their efficiency, high security and lower costs.
Around 70 per cent of gen z use lockers for their online purchases, according to Retail Economics.
It’s all about visibility
The main challenge Inpost faces at the moment is access to lockers. Even if demand is there, if Inpost haven’t installed a locker reasonably close to the consumer, they will likely opt for a different delivery method.
Similarly, if the customer isn’t given the option to delivery their parcel to a locker at the online check out – or if the delivery is automatically sent to their primary address – they won’t use Inpost.
The company is working to solve both these issues. It has launched a new business-to-consumer product in an attempt to turn checkout delivery “on its head” Kuschel said.
The product will see customers able to choose lockers in checkout, and the company already has deals with H&M, Zara, and River Island.
It is also rapidly expanding the number of lockers – both standalone and in shops – in UK towns, villages and cities. This time last year, the company had 5,400 lockers in the UK. Now, there are 7,500.
Kuschel said Inpost wants everyone in the UK to be within seven minutes of a locker. That figure currently stands at 64 per cent, although it is 88 per cent in Poland.
“It used to be quite hard to sell the concept of a locker,” Kuschel said. “[But now] we’ve nearly reached the critical mass of starting to be close enough to people to be able to really drive user adoption”.
“The more people get used to using lockers, the more it helps,” he added.