With many people relying on a stable and efficient parcel delivery service at some point in their lifetime, it is becoming increasingly important for businesses to ensure that the service being provided is as quick as possible. Customers are demanding faster home delivery services, which are still extremely affordable, which is leading to the rise in eCommerce sites such as Amazon beginning to take over the likes of the Royal Mail when it comes to offering a fast delivery service with reliable couriers. Here we are going to look at how e-commerce sites such as Amazon could mean the end of the Royal Mail as we know it.
Choice Of Couriers
With the sheer number of people that are ordering parcels year in year out, there is a high demand for the very best that parcel delivery can offer. While Amazon delivery relies on a number of different couriers to ensure that their prices remain competitive and items arrive quickly, the Royal Mail resort to their own drivers. This can lead to a series of delays throughout the supply chain from the Royal Mail.
A number of businesses are also turning to Amazon as a worldwide marketplace and will list their products for sale on this platform. This then gives them access to a broad range of customers, and the ability to access a series of delivery services to ensure that they are keeping up with customer demand – something which the Royal Mail has struggled with for a long time now.
Inability To Compete
With the increased demand that Amazon has been receiving over the past few years, the company have been forced into hiring more drivers, therefore slowly pushing Royal Mail out of the game.
Further to this, with the addition of their Amazon Prime option, some deliveries can even turn up on the same day or early the next day – while Royal Mail does offer some services similar to this, they appear to be more unreliable and will often stick to strict times, typically during working hours. The couriers that Amazon use can deliver up until very late in the evenings, further helping to make Amazon more attractive.
Additionally, Amazon has recently announced a newspaper delivery service to major retailers, this, therefore, poses a direct threat for the Royal Mail as this will take a large chunk of the business that they have previously owned.
Reliability
One of the key aspects that Amazon prides itself on is the reliability of their delivery drivers and the services that they provide. With Prime delivery offering a next day service at an affordable price and accurate delivery times, they are certainly fulfilling changing customer demands. This is more than can be said for the Royal Mail that has had numerous issues with delivery and as there are no estimated delivery times, customers often are unavailable to receive their parcel and have to go to their local branch to collect it. This can, therefore, cause issues for those that do not live close to a post office and have to travel to receive their parcels. In addition to offering a reliable service, Amazon also offers the option of lockers, which can make the entire experience far more convenient for customers.
With all this in mind and the increased use of e-commerce within everyday life, we may well be witnessing the slow decline in the use of the Royal Mail unless it finds a way to compete with the fast delivery times of Amazon and other e-commerce sites who use a selection of courier services.
