The UK’s delivery system has reached breaking point, under increasing strain as online shopping volumes rise and lifestyles become more time pressured.
Millions of consumers spend hours every week waiting at home for parcels, queuing for returns or worrying about missed or stolen deliveries. This is a growing source of frustration for consumers and a major operational burden for retailers who are navigating rising redelivery costs and customer service demand.
New research from InPost UK reveals that consumers are no longer willing to tolerate these challenges.
Younger, digitally focused shoppers are driving a decisive shift toward faster, safer and more reliable parcel solutions they can control.
Parcel lockers are rapidly emerging as a mainstream out-of-home delivery option — offering security, convenience and peace of mind for consumers, as well as providing increased business opportunities for locker hosts.
Paul Selvey, Network Director of InPost, tells Grocery Trader how InPost Lockers are boosting footfall, driving incremental spend and customer loyalty, creating significant opportunities for retailers.
Can you give us some background about yourself.
I’m not a logistics and parcels veteran. I’ve spent around 30 years in FMCG and retail, working with many of the leading players.
That experience has been invaluable at InPost, where I’ve been for just under two years now. It’s a fantastic role because my team sits right at the forefront of what is probably the biggest, most significant change in customer behaviour in this industry for a generation.
My team has three broad functions. On the commercial side, we have a team that manages all of our retail partners and property owners, helping them unlock the value in their locations by hosting a locker. Then I have a big operational team that focus on locker deployment to the highest possible quality standards, as well as a maintenance team ensuring that those lockers are always functioning and up and running for our customers.
I think every industry gets to a tipping point where convenience isn’t an option anymore, it’s essential because customers demand it, and the parcel industry has reached that point now. By building our InPost Locker network, we’re directly responding to that need and transforming the way that people send, collect and return their parcels.
What are some of the challenges faced by the UK delivery system?
One of the biggest challenges in the UK delivery system is security. Government data shows that around £666 million worth of parcels are stolen off the doorsteps every single year, which is huge. And our research backs that up, with figures showing a third of consumers experienced an issue with their most recent delivery, whether that’s a missed delivery, lost package, or parcel theft.
Lockers directly address this issue with parcels delivered to a safe, secure and convenient location. As e-commerce volumes continue to rise and people’s lives get busier and busier, consumers want more security and more control over how and when they receive their parcels. They’re no longer willing to tolerate companies dictating that it has to be delivered within a specific hour on a specific day.
One of the biggest challenges as an industry is meeting those customer needs around security, convenience and also around pace.
That’s the beauty of lockers. When you checkout of a merchant’s online shop, you can say, I want to deliver to a locker and can select a location that works for you, whether it’s on your way to work, near a train station or a supermarket, and we’ll get it to that point for you, so you can collect it at a location and time that’s convenient for you.
What are the advantages of parcel lockers for consumers?
Convenience is one of the most important factors driving locker adoption. Today, over 50% of the UK population live within reach of one of our lockers and 75% in the top three cities (Birmingham, Manchester and London) are within 7-minutes walking distance of one of our out-of-home points. From a customer point of view, it’s that convenience, reliability and security that is really driving locker use. Lockers remove the stress of waiting in for deliveries, missing a parcel or worrying about parcels being left outside or stolen, allowing consumers to send or receive a parcel at a time and location that is convenient for them.
How many consumers do you think use them in UK?
We’re at this tipping point. Lockers are no longer niche, they’ve grown to become a mainstream delivery solution. Our data shows that 41% of people already receive parcels through lockers and 44% of people send them this way.
InPost was the first to market with lockers and we are by far the number one choice with 62% of locker users saying if they were to choose a provider, they choose us. That gives us a great advantage in a growing market where more people are using lockers.
How long has InPost been in business?
Our founder, Rafa? Brzoska, first started the company in 2006 in Poland. That’s when the market really exploded, and then it expanded across Europe. We’ve been operating in the UK for nearly eight years and the big shift has really come in the four years as shopper behaviour has moved significantly towards out-of-home delivery versus to door. Covid was a massive boost to e-commerce and that really drove a huge acceleration in our growth. Everyone thought when we came out of Covid that volumes would start to drop, but the trends continued. E-commerce volumes are now growing faster, and that’s perfect for our businesses, and we are growing our network to cater for this rise in demand.
The growth in e-commerce is especially being driven by a younger, more digitally focused shopper. These shoppers want to receive their purchases faster and in a safe environment that is more convenient. Those are the benefits that lockers bring. Two thirds of InPost users are either Gen Z or millennials. They’re affluent customers with an average salary of around £49k, so they have money to spend, and are big online shoppers that are really driving the acceleration of locker use. So that’s a real benefit for retailers. This is a customer base that retailers are trying to attract, because they’re high earners and high spenders who are shaping the future of retail. By hosting a locker, retailers can attract this valuable and growing customer base into their retail environment.
Are InPost lockers boosting footfall for retailers?
Massively. Our research backs up what retailers have been telling us for a long time, and that was one of the big drivers behind us conducting this research. The data tells us that over half of locker users’ visits to retail locations are prompted by the presence of a locker. And that figure is even higher for those users whose preferred parcel location is a supermarket at 58%. But not only are they visiting these locations, they’re going more often, with 64% locker users saying they visit a retail location more frequently because of the locker. With the rise in returns and the growth of online seller platforms such as Vinted and eBay, there’s now a constant flow of parcel activity and that directly benefits retailers who host lockers with increased footfall.
Have you got any stats that say whether they’re likely to make impulse purchases in-store?
Yes, definitely. Again, that’s something we’ve heard anecdotally from our retail locker hosts and our research really backs this up with data showing that that lockers are generating incremental, high value purchases. Our figures show that 90% of people that use a locker at a supermarket go on to make a purchase in store, spending on average £19.90 per visit.
Do you think it’s driving loyalty among shoppers? Absolutely. Lockers have become a core part of shopper loyalty. When flexibility is limited, customers are more willing to take their spend elsewhere. Our research shows that 79% of locker users would switch to another retail location if the locker was removed highlighting just how crucial they are for retaining shopper loyalty. Another interesting finding from our research is how lockers shape the overall impression that shoppers have of a store, with 56% saying that they’ve got a much more positive opinion of a retailer because it has a locker.
How many lockers have you got in the network?
We are very close to hitting our 14,000 locker milestone. That’s actual locker locations, which works out to about a million compartments, across the UK, right from Thurso in the very north of Scotland down to Penzance in Cornwall, We manage the network in a dynamic way, driven by how much capacity we need in any given area to ensure we’re providing full geographical coverage.
Is there anything you would like to add?
We are working to rapidly meet changing customer expectations. Shoppers want more control, more flexibility and more reliability – and lockers deliver that. For our retail hosts, the benefits are clear. Lockers drive increased footfall, incremental revenue and create stronger shopper loyalty with no operational burden for the retailer so everyone wins.
The growth of out-of-home delivery relies on collaboration across the industry. E-commerce merchants also have a role to play in this to make sure that lockers are available and clearly visible at checkout so when people buy things online, that they can choose a locker. As demand for convenient, secure and reliable parcel delivery solutions grow, there’s a huge headroom for growth. Consumers are already telling us that this is what they want and, as an industry, it’s our job to make this happen.
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