Amazon to Offer Package Pickup at Nearly 5,000 Shops in UK
Think that Amazon’s parcel pickup lockers might represent a threat to brick-and-mortar bookstores, if the company ever gets around to putting enough of them in? Well, in the UK, Amazon appears set to leapfrog over that rollout obstacle by teaming up with a courier service called Collect+ that already offers parcel pickup and delivery from 4,900 shops nationwide—many of them convenience stores that are open a lot later than the local post office.
The Telegraph reports that Amazon has begun trying the plan out on a small scale with books and clothes, but plans to roll it out nationwide. This will, of course, spark concerns among traditional “high street” retailers who had ample cause for alarm about Amazon already. It’s one thing to offer greater convenience and reach for e-books, but if they can extend that same convenience to paper books, too, the bookstores could be in even more trouble.
I wish Amazon would hurry up and roll something like that out in my area. Since I no longer have a car, package delivery has become a bit challenging. I’ve used ship-to-store services from both Wal-Mart and Best Buy and been very satisfied with the results, but I’d prefer to order from Amazon which has both the prices and selection I want.
Of course, shipping is irrelevant where e-books are concerned, but sooner or later you need physical goods. (It’s quaint to look back on the early days of the commercial Internet, when people experimented to see if they could live solely on items they bought on-line. They’d have no problem now.)
Photo by William Christiansen.
Comments
India Drummond August 22, 2012 um 4:13 am
I joined Amazon Prime earlier this year. I also don’t drive any more, and shipping costs were making shopping online sometimes very impractical. Sure, I could order just about anything for home delivery, but I was sometimes being asked to pay the same (or more) in shipping than a small product cost in the first place. I LOVE Prime. I wasn’t sure it would be worth the money, but it’s so nice. I get next-day delivery free. I’m sure that in 3 months, it’s already more than paid for itself.
The downside is not ALL products on Amazon UK are eligible for Prime delivery, but I have found that if one product isn’t, I can usually find a suitable alternative product that is.
I never ever thought I’d use Prime. When it first came out, my impression was that it was borderline scammy, a way to lock people in to shopping with Amazon… but now that I’ve given it a try, I find it’s the perfect solution for my current situation, where going to the shops just isn’t practical. Besides, in the past few years, I’ve found I do most of my shopping with Amazon anyway.