No address? Pick up your delivery from 'Amazon lockers'

If you’ve ever played tag with the postman, who seems to only come when you’re out, you’ll know that the elephant in the room of online shopping is delivery. Amazon has been trialling a locker system in its home town of Seattle to solve this issue and is now rolling it out to areas in New York and London. The system allows users to select a pick-up location near them when ordering online, then sends an access code which customers key in to a central console when they go to pick up their delivery. There appear to be eight locations in New York City and three in central London that users can choose from. From photographs it seems that there are 40 lockers at each location. Infrastructure is expensive to build out, but if successful it could save Amazon a lot of money in delivery costs, especially on their popular free Super Saver delivery option. The use of lockers means deliveries are more efficient: Instead of having to deliver 40 packages to 40 different addresses, they have one delivery to 40 lockers at a single location. The locker system also reduces the cost of multiple deliveries of the same package to the same address when the customer is out or, in my experience, because the delivery person couldn’t be bothered to ring the doorbell and wait for you to answer. [caption id=“attachment_109964” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=". Amazon has been trialling a locker system in its home town of Seattle to solve this issue and is now rolling it out to areas in New York and London. AFP"]  [/caption] There are also clear advantages to customers, who can pick a convenient locker and get their delivery faster and with less hassle. With so few locker stations currently available, however, it’s going to be a while before everyone can enjoy the experience. It also remains to be seen whether the costs of installing the necessary infrastructure will be balanced out by the savings in delivery costs. The locker system could prove useful in India, where Amazon is rumoured to be launching next year. Although Amazon doesn’t yet have a dedicated Indian site, it is possible to buy from the US, but postage charges are high and delivery is slow. Earlier this year, Amazon UK extended its Super Saver free delivery offer to India, for orders over £25. Flipkart, India’s biggest online bookseller, has warehouses in five cities and usually uses couriers for deliveries. Launched in 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, both ex-Amazon.com software developers, delivery was an early challenge. They told DNA:

“We were doing everything ourselves for the first four to five months - from packing to shipping. Because our volumes were very low, our courier partners would sometimes refuse to pick up items from our apartment,” Sachin Bansal recalls of the six months before they moved into their first office. “So we used to get on a motorbike, hold the shipment in our hands and personally deliver them to our Bangalore clients.”

But it will remain to be seen if the cost of infrastructure could be recouped in a country where, of a population of 1.2 bn people, only 52 mn are active internet users and only 40 percent of them shop online. Flipkart has the advantage over Amazon in India because it allows customers to pay cash on delivery, essential given that only 18 mn Indians use credit cards. Now Flipkart has its own delivery service running. The ecommerce market is expanding in India and is expected to grow by over 47 percent this year, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India. Amazon entering the market could be a good thing, according to Sachin Bansal. Amazon has a lot of heft and could help expand the market, making ecommerce more viable and attractive. It could indeed be a rising tide which floats all boats.