DPD has completed the roll-out of its Saturday delivery service across Germany turning Saturday into a 'normal delivery day' for 100% of private recipients in the country as it anticipates strong volume increase in B2C shipping in the future.
The company launched Saturday deliveries in May last year after a successful trial phase. By September 2014, the service had been made available to around 30% of the country’s population and in the spring of this year its nationwide roll-out was poised for completion.
By May 2015, more than 80% of all consignees in Germany were getting their parcels delivered by DPD on a six-day per week basis in both rural and urban areas.
In the final stage of the roll-out, DPD has now established six-day deliveries in Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt, as well as in the country's remaining cities and regions to ensure every single household in Germany can profit from the service.
DPD Germany explained that the six-day delivery service enables faster and more efficient deliveries to private consignees throughout Germany as they are much more likely to be reached at home on Saturdays than during the working days. For many online shoppers, the additional delivery day shortens the waiting time between placing their order and receiving the goods.
“With the comprehensive launch of Saturday deliveries as a standard service for all households in Germany, DPD has finally established itself as a major provider in the growing B2C parcel market,” DPD Germany CEO Boris Winkelmann said.
“For many shippers and consignees, Saturday delivery has become a basic requirement, which is ideally complemented by our innovative, digital service options. As a result, this opens up further potential growth areas for DPD which we are ideally prepared for in operational terms.”
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.
