New players challenge posts and parcel carriers

Online shopping platforms, technology companies and ‘customer experience’ specialists are just some of the diverse new players challenging postal operators and parcel carriers in the last-mile delivery business as B2C volumes continue to surge, according to industry experts.

At the same time, innovative new services such as ‘phygital’ solutions are transforming e-commerce delivery while air capacity shortages remain a major challenge for international flows, top managers said in a conference session on ‘Lessons learned from the pandemic’ at last week’s Parcel + Post Expo in Vienna.

Platforms, IT and customer experience specialists

Mike Richmond, chief commercial officer at delivery technology company Doddle (which supplies out-of-home solutions to postal, parcel and e-retail companies), underlined the rise of new players in the fast-changing e-commerce delivery world.

These included platforms such as Shopify and Salesforce which give merchants more delivery choices, retailer logistics services such as Shipping by Amazon which offer a full range of shipping services, and even payment providers offering delivery payment solutions. 

In terms of customer experience, Richmond highlighted the differences between online shopper priorities at ‘checkout’, which focus mostly on product cost and delivery choices, and in the after-sales period, when control of delivery options became more important. “Good carriers are investing in interactive parcel management,” he observed.

However, a new category of ‘customer experience’ specialists (such as ParcelLab and Parcel Perform) is now emerging, he pointed out. “They are between the retailer and the carrier. Posts must fight to control customer communications,” he urged.

Richmond warned: “The postal and parcel industry thinks about hardware but not enough about software. The danger is that postal operators could become ‘disintermediated’. Carriers have got to innovate faster.”

Getting ‘phygital’

Innovations were one of the topics addressed by Dirk Appelmans, head of the postal unit at Belgian regulator BIPT, who presented some of the main recent developments on the Belgian market, including rapid volume growth, air and logistics capacity shortages, and delivery delays.

He highlighted the emergence of ‘phygital’ solutions, which combine physical and digital services, such as click & collect, web-to-store and Virtual Reality solutions. One innovative example of this are bpost’s fitting rooms in post offices where customers can try on clothes that they ordered online and then collected, he pointed out.

Addressing international issues, Alexander Shchekotin, CPO of cross-border delivery start-up PostPlus, contrasted the boom in domestic parcel volumes during the pandemic with the slump in cross-border shipments due to the collapse in air capacity.

“Capacity will return”

Diverse issues including supply chain disruptions and cross-border capacity were addressed during a subsequent speakers’ panel discussion.

Emirates Post CEO Peter Somers, who had presented the postal operator’s ongoing transformation, was optimistic that the collapse in intercontinental air capacity would only be temporary. “Capacity will return. Global trade lanes will not disappear,” he commented.  

In contract, he predicted that untracked parcel products “will disappear” in the near future due to changing customer requirements. “There will only be tracked in a couple of years,” he forecast.  

Air and ocean giants move into delivery

Somers also highlighted underlying changes in transportation, citing the example of Maersk’s acquisition of two B2C delivery companies to handle the rising quantity of B2C shipments within ocean containers requiring last-mile delivery.

“Airlines and ocean freight companies will make moves into fulfilment and the delivery space,” he predicted.