In the next month, several retail brands will begin trialling Royal Mail’s new Sunday delivery service across the UK, with the post currently in discussions with additional retailers about rolling out the service to their customers too.
The trial is the first step in Royal Mail’s move to tap into the seven-days-a-week delivery market as more and more consumers expect Sunday deliveries as part of their online shopping experience. The introduction of a seven-day parcel delivery market for major retail customers is one of the ways Royal Mail says it is responding to the marked increase in parcel volumes and changing customer expectations for more frequent and convenient deliveries.
The construction of Royal Mail’s second parcel hub is also underway in Daventry in the Midlands as the company accelerates its transformation and manages the growth in demand for parcels. Once complete, the new hub will be the size of more than 10 football pitches and have the capacity to process over one million parcels per day, making it the largest Royal Mail parcel hub in the UK.
Nick Landon, chief commercial officer at Royal Mail, commented, “The UK already trusts us to deliver their purchases six days a week both quickly and conveniently. Now for the first time our posties will be doing the same thing seven days a week. The last year has reset so many customer expectations, and the desire for even more convenient and even more frequent parcel deliveries has certainly been one of them. We always listen to our customers, both senders and recipients, and the ask here was clear: we love what you do Monday to Saturday, so please do the same on a Sunday. So that’s what we’re doing, as quickly as possible, so we can offer it to more and more customers across the course of this year. It’s another really exciting change delivered by our trusted people and network.”