damm missed delivery's

jinx_uk_98

shelly wrote:

If you work mon-fri 9-5 and miss your own deliveries how are you going to be there to accept everyone elses parcels?

if I was to do this then i quit my current job.


Delivery's could also be the sort of items delivered from comet/curry's etc.... you would no longer have to take a whole day off work just get it delivered to me and I would drop it off at a time convienant to you.

thanks for all the feedback - very useful.

*Louise*

I think it's a great idea.

It's a pain when you wait in ALL day for a delivery and it turns up at 4pm :rolleyes:

And the parcel collection in my area shuts at 12.30pm, so no-one can collect stuff after work.

I'm lucky I'm at home - I get loads of stuff delivered, and my family have started getting theirs sent to me.

motorguy

jinx_uk_98 wrote:

if I was to do this then i quit my current job.


Delivery's could also be the sort of items delivered from comet/curry's etc.... you would no longer have to take a whole day off work just get it delivered to me and I would drop it off at a time convienant to you.

thanks for all the feedback - very useful.

Doing the maths though, given you'd need storage space, public liabitility insurance and make enough to make it worthwhile, you'd need something like 300 parcels a week @ £1.50 to make it hold water. Plus you'd have to be available 08:00 -> 18:00 to receive parcels and then 18:00 -> 22:00 to have them collected, plus probably saturday all day. Which is all a long time to not leave the house,Plus youd have to have the agreement of all the parcel companies that they are happy leaving the items with you

motorguy

jinx_uk_98 wrote:

if I was to do this then i quit my current job.


Delivery's could also be the sort of items delivered from comet/curry's etc.... you would no longer have to take a whole day off work just get it delivered to me and I would drop it off at a time convienant to you.

thanks for all the feedback - very useful.

... plus if you drop off any amount of parcels in an evening you'd need a van etc...

bleugh

I seriously looked into this just after leaving uni back in 2000, I was to offer out of hours delivery within 10-15 miles of my postcode,
you'd be looking at getting around 100,000 - 250,000 leaflets made up and blanket advertising - papers, shops, etc, etc,
advertising on radio works well also, get the times in during commuting hours - quite expensive though
you'd need storage space, heavily insured
thats just the start, you'd be looking at 15-20k to set yourself up ready for the critical mass amount of custom to break even

for your thing to work, you'd need a professional website, easy enough to do, and a comprehensive CRM system with complete history / tracking number and contact details, photographs / digital recording of parcel states, you need real transperency to account for the idiots you'll get and the scammers

BUT, (here's the big but) to really reach a critical mass, you'd need to get in cahoots with the big online payment people like paypal and nochex (nochex is the easier of the two to talk to)

the major stick in the wheels of the operation is the fact that paypal does NOT cover sellers if the parcel is delivered to anything other than the buyers registered address

thats just ebay..................., thats the hard one to do,

others like catalogue companies are easy, any address can be used as the delivery address!

in concept, it's a great idea, but in reality there can be a surprisingly large amount of costly ramifications for yourself and for a seller when a different address is submitted



one way I looked into this was making a comprehensive list of all the local and national courier / delivery services and offering an out of hours re-distribution service from their own local depos (around 60 well known ones were local!)

however, initial enquiries showed that, yes, there's a demand for such a service, however, no-one wants to pay for it :-(.........

not to mention, how do you charge for the holding and delivery service?, subscription?, payment on receipt of parcel?, payment to release parcel?, mileage from your depot?


basically, go into this assuming that people are blithering idiots and you'll not be dissapointed, how are you going to tell which of the 1000's of brown boxes with no identifying marks on them and nothing inside other than a poorly wrapped object thats now broken, the buyer calls you two months later to see where it is and they can no longer do a paypal chargeback because you could not identify who it belonged to!
initially it won't be a problem due to low numbers of customers but do bear it in mind

msdl28712

Also just to add my bit i would never ebay wise send a item to alternative address same as purchasing online item has to be sent to the billing address

Major fraud would be commited if it was that easy

ie get loads of ppl parcels sent to your address then scarper

trinity36

i used to work for a courier company whos main delivery times were 9 to 5.30, and i can honestly say, your better off having the delivery to your work place as long as your employer is ok with that.

my favourite complaint will always be that they were going to contact watchdog and complain, a courier companies take on this is that you paid for the service, so you should wait in - all day, no popping to the shops for 5 minutes, no picking up your kids, no taking a shower or going to the loo, just sit by the door and be patient !!!- and in the real world???????

on a final note, courier companies charge a fortune, at the company i used to work for, the collecting branch got paid more than the delivering branch (approx £1.58 to deliver each parcel), so they will always give collections a priority over deliveries

shelly

In theory its a good idea but in reality I echo what pgilc1 said. People would have to trust you with their deliveries and in this day and age theres not many folk about who would do that.

jinx_uk_98

thankyou all for your useful comments.

shelly wrote:

In theory its a good idea but in reality I echo what pgilc1 said. People would have to trust you with their deliveries and in this day and age theres not many folk about who would do that.

my question is then: What you make you trust me with your deliveries??

maybe some online testimonials?

windym_2

Aside of all this, how could you deliver to the East side of your county and the West side at the same time because Mrs Smith wants her delivery at 8pm and Mrs Jones does too? How would you contact these people to arrange this time? What if you had an accident on the way somewhere or the van broke down. Who then would pay the compensation for not delivering?

I like the entrepreneur in you, but I think this one is just too expensive in both time and money.