E-retail delivery volumes in the UK posted year-on-year growth of 15.7% in 2015 exceeding a 13% growth forecast, with a new record in total parcel volumes dispatched through UK carriers last year, according to the British e-commerce association IMRG.
After a slow start to the year, 2015 ended strongly as the UK’s e-logistics sector dispatched a record 1.065 billion parcels, of which an estimated 260 million were handled during the peak trading period in November and December – around 10 million more than anticipated. The Christmas season thus generated around 25% of the annual e-parcel volumes in just two months, according to the IMRG MetaPack UK Delivery Index, which measures parcel volumes generated by e-commerce.
IMRG stressed, however, that there was a “notable shift” in the month-on-month growth rate between November and December. “Normally we see a sharp increase in November with that trend line steepening further as we move into December, but this year it flattened slightly – indicating that shoppers brought much of their Christmas spending forward in response to many retailers extending their Black Friday discount periods and moving them forward.”
Despite the huge volumes moving through fulfilment operations during the peak, the level of ‘on-time’ delivery performance exceeded 92% throughout the Christmas period – a record high for this time of year, the Delivery Index has shown.
Andrew Starkey, IMRG’s head of e-logistics, said: “After the issues caused by the unprecedented scale of the Black Friday weekend last year, it’s very encouraging to see just how efficiently fulfilment operations ran on the whole this year – with 92% of deliveries made on-time during peak, a significant improvement on 89% in the same period last year. It’s a testament to all the hard work that industry has put in over the past year.”
Looking ahead to 2016, he highlighted a number of key focus areas for fulfilment operations such as improving returns management, creating new capacity including the wider adoption of third party click & collect services, better transparency for cross-border deliveries and wider provision of in-transit delivery information.
Kees de Vos, chief product officer at MetaPack, added: “The profile of the peak period was entirely different to any previous year and highlighted just how important it is for both retailers and the carrier community to plan ahead, communicate and work closely in tandem. Customers took full advantage of flexible offers over a longer period of time, which could be fulfilled efficiently leading to enhanced customer service. As a result the industry didn’t just reach the record billion parcel mark, it smashed right through it.”
The IMRG MetaPack UK Delivery Index was designed to enable the e-retail industry to track a wide range of key benchmark metrics to enable organisations to benchmark performance, track trends and inform strategic decisions. The index covers more than 200 retailers and an average of more than 5 million orders per month.
