DPD Austria has launched evening deliveries for the major drugstore chain BIPA in Vienna and is investing €30 million in its infrastructure, capacity and technology to cope with rising parcel volumes, especially during the busy Christmas season.
With immediate effect, DPD Austria is offering a special service to all BIPA customers in the metropolitan area of Vienna: on request, they can get their online orders delivered in the evening between 5 and 8:30 pm. To use the service, they just need to select the delivery option “Evening” at BIPA’s online shop when purchasing their products.
“After a successfully completed trial phase, we are now going live with our evening delivery service for BIPA," said Rainer Schwarz, DPD Austria managing director. He added: "It provides a stress-free shopping experience for BIPA online shop customers in the Vienna area. Orders can be placed conveniently on the Internet and DPD delivers the BIPA parcel when the customer is at home. That's very often the case in the evening."
When choosing the evening delivery option, BIPA customers have access to DPD’s comprehensive service range including the DPD Predict service with a three-hour delivery time slot. If parcel recipients are not at home at the time of delivery, they can re-direct the parcel, e.g. to a neighbour, or re-schedule the delivery date. They can also order delivery to the BIPA branch of their choice and pick the parcel up when it suits them. In addition, customers can track their parcel in real time on the Internet via DPD's live tracking so they know when the parcel arrives almost to the minute.
With e-commerce boosting DPD’s parcel volumes, the company needs to expand its capacity accordingly as customers’ service expectations are constantly increasing. In the first half of November alone, for example, almost 30,000 DPD customers changed their scheduled deliveries, e.g. the address or delivery date. Compared to 2016, the company expected to deliver 12% more parcels to private recipients in 2017.
"Our goal is to continue offering our customers the quality and speed they are accustomed to even when the parcel volumes are rising. That's why we are investing a total of €30 million in the expansion of our infrastructure, freight capacity, technology and security,” Schwarz commented.
The long-serving manager explained: “Our logistics centres and more than 1,000 drivers are facing a new challenge. The reason for this is that Austrians are among the busiest online shoppers in Europe. They often buy more on the Internet than average and make almost 13% of their total purchases in virtual shops. For us parcel service providers, this is reflected in the delivery volumes.”
He continued: “In addition, we are observing that Christmas parcels are being ordered and shipped earlier than ever before. We thus set our parcel record for 2017 already in November.” DPD Austria handled more than 260,000 parcels on November 16, its busiest day of the day until then. It has not yet announced figures for December and 2017 as a whole.
