DPD has extended its Saturday delivery service nationwide across Germany thus completing its B2C offering for private customers as it anticipates strong volume increase in B2C shipping in the future.
The company launched Saturday deliveries a year ago thus turning Saturday into a 'normal delivery day' to boost B2C business and making it part of its standard services after a successful trial phase. By September last year, the service had been made available to around 30% of the country’s population and gradually expanded towards a nationwide rollout this spring.
More than 80% of all consignees in Germany can already receive parcels delivered by DPD on six days a week in both rural and urban areas, which means that Saturday deliveries are now available to more than 65 million people. The few remaining areas will be added during the coming months, DPD said.
The Saturday delivery service especially benefits those recipients who are normally not at home during the week and prefer not to take advantage of alternative delivery options.
“The successful launch of Saturday deliveries rounds off our services in the area of parcel shipping to private consignees," DPD Germany CEO Boris Winkelmann commented. “For many B2C shippers, Saturday deliveries are a basic precondition, and not just in individual locations but as a standard service to everyone. With nationwide Saturday deliveries, DPD is opening up further growth potential on the B2C market."
Before the launch of Saturday as a normal delivery day, DPD usually only delivered five days a week from Monday to Friday, with Saturday delivery being available on request only as an express service option. This was because DPD’s main focus had originally been on B2B customers who are only available from Monday to Friday to receive their parcels The Saturday delivery service primarily targets private consignees.
Currently, DPD delivers every third parcel to a private customer and expects its B2C volumes to rise strongly in the years to come. The company puts a special focus on those customers and shippers for whom maximum transparency and flexibility are a priority. In addition to Saturday delivery, an important component of this strategy is a precise prediction of the delivery time window, the DPD Predict service, which has been meanwhile narrowed down to 30 minutes.
In the course of the delivery itself, consignees can see in real time on an online map how many stops the driver still has to make before he/she will be ringing the doorbell with their own parcel. They are notified about the delivery the day before and can make use of various options to redirect the parcel if necessary, even up to 5 minutes before the delivery is actually made.
