Spring 2009

Could IMRG's bold plan to define standards for home delivery finally bring all those individual solutions in from the cold?

You've selected your goods, you've clicked the 'Proceed to checkout' button, and now you're selecting your delivery option from a drop-down list. Next-day? Three-day? It depends what the retailer offers.

What if there were another drop-down box as well? One headed 'delivery solution', or words to that effect. The default would usually be 'deliver to my front door', but it would also list other options, such as 'deliver into my drop-box', 'deliver to a box bank', or 'leave with a neighbour'. Again, it would depend on what the retailer offered.

The trouble is, practically no retailer offers a selection of this kind. To all intents and purposes, such lists don't exist: certainly not at a generic level. Some suppliers can offer integration between retail web sites and their own delivery solutions, and some retailers certainly do offer a range of delivery options; but there are no generally agreed definitions of what these options should entail, or how they should work.

 

This in turn probably stems from the fact that historically, neither retailers nor carriers have focused much attention on what is seen increasingly as 'the delivery problem'. Efforts to deal with it have usually been made on a unilateral basis by more enlightened retailers.

Why has there not been more action on this front in the past? Some of the reasons are discussed in our extended feature on unattended delivery solutions. However, many in the retail and carrier world suspect that a basic obstacle has been the fact that there is no generally agreed vocabulary for describing delivery solutions, and no acknowledged standard for them. Any retailer offering support for them is entering relatively uncharted territory.

Which is why IMRG, the internet retailers' organisation, has set up a working group to produce a set of standards for the entire home delivery process. The programme is not limited to unattended delivery solutions; it aims to approach the subject in a holistic way. But implicit in its work is the idea of defining and describing various generic types of delivery solution, so that retailers will have the chance to offer them to consumers in the knowledge that there is broad agreement on what they consist of.

Comprehensive solution set

These solutions could comprise an alternative delivery address, a 'safe place' for leaving goods, a drop-box, a box bank, a high-street drop-off network or a home access system. The idea is to draw these disparate systems together in a more formalised way than ever before, encouraging the e-retail community to see them as components in a comprehensive solution set.

The group is avoiding being narrow or prescriptive in its focus. Early thoughts of setting up a certification programme for delivery devices and solutions were quickly dismissed as prohibitively expensive and over-complicated for all parties. Instead, the working group hopes to come up with a range of definitions and descriptions of the various parts of the delivery process – considering, for instance, what should constitute a 'secure' location.

This could give rise to a range of definitions for generic solutions, any of which could be harnessed to provide the final delivery. The key proviso – and this is where the remit goes beyond delivery solutions alone – is that the delivery as a whole should be considered 'acceptable' within the working group's terms. So part of its discussion will focus on what in fact constitutes a satisfactory delivery process.

Included in the group's research will be the vexed question of how to deal with deliveries that fail because the retailer has insisted on a signature from the recipient, and there is no one at home to give one.

The requirement, and the leeway of carriers to exercise discretion in how they interpret it, is fraught with potential legal pitfalls, and the group is expected to consider these issues, possibly suggesting where the law might need to be looked at again.

So how is it envisaged that the chosen solutions be presented to the world in practice? Until the group publishes its findings, that will remain an unknown, but it is easy enough to imagine that its proposals could be embodied in retail software such as IMRG's own Delivery Manager system (developed in association with MetaPack), or in the corresponding carrier selection modules included in third-party fulfilment software or offered as add-ons.

Generic integration

It's likely that the group will propose generic ways of integrating delivery solutions with any retail web site. So the outcome really could be a drop-down box on one of the e-retailer's checkout screens, offering a selected range of delivery options.

In a nutshell, the ideal is that delivery solutions will become an integral feature of the delivery selection process presented to consumers.

Delivery solutions suppliers themselves have expressed mixed feelings about the initiative. Several are represented in the working group, which implies a strong underlying body of support for the concept. However, others have voiced concern that the findings might end up favouring particular types of solution to the detriment of others.

In practice, there is no evidence that such an outcome has any place in IMRG's thinking. Its avowed intent is to create 'something that is all-encompassing'. It's hard to see how that can do anything but help retailers improve their delivery performance.