Parcel lockers are already a familiar sight in mainline train and London Underground stations, convenience stores and supermarkets – and now they’re coming to Victoria Coach Station too.
InPost is installing its brand of click and collect lockers at the London coach station, where fashion retailer Asos will be among the first retailers to offer customers the choice of picking up their parcels there.
The move is part of a growing trend towards bringing ecommerce parcel collection close to customers as they go about their everyday lives. InPost also has lockers in London Underground stations, while retailers such as Waitrose and Asda are enabling click and collect deliveries to London Underground car parks, and John Lewis is opening a click and commute shop in St Pancras station. Meanwhile, Doddle , a Network Rail joint venture, is also bringing its brand of parcel collection shops to mainline train stations around the country.
InPost has identified Victoria Coach Station as one of the busiest transport hubs in the UK, serving 12m passengers a year.
Matt Rogers, director of delivery solutions at Asos.com, said: “We’re delighted to see InPost securing locations such as Victoria Coach Station. We are working with InPost to integrate these locations into our checkout to offer our customers a wider choice of collection points. We look forward to developing our click and collect offer with InPost and hope to be able to offer these services later this summer.”
Michelle De Pasquale, commercial director at InPost, said: “InPost is the perfect partner for busy commuters. Our lockers offer our customers convenience and Victoria Coach Station is a fantastic site for the thousands of commuters who pass through the station each day. People don’t want to wait in all day for their parcel to arrive and now, with our ever growing network, they don’t have to.”
Graeme Craig, director of commercial development at Transport for London, welcomed the move as one that would make it easier for its customers to collect their online orders. “We are increasingly working with a range of world-class retailers to provide the goods and services that our customers want, generating revenues for us to reinvest back into our transport network.”
InPost says it will soon have parcel lockers in 1,000 locations, with installations to come at about 40 Transport for London sites over coming months. It plans to have lockers in more than 2,000 UK sites by the end of 2015.
The company recently signed a partnership agreement with Morrisons Supermarket that will see lockers placed at a number of its UK sites.
