Editor's Blog Section

From Opinion column, issue 51 – spring 2009

What is a satisfactory home delivery? It’s a more complex question than it sounds.

Purists might say it’s when the item arrives at their front door on a nominated day at a pre-agreed time, and is handed to them personally by the delivery driver.

Others might say it’s when the item is delivered to the nearest post office or convenience store for collection when they’re ready for it. Or left in a locker-box at the railway station they commute from. Or handed to a neighbour. Or slid under a piece of corrugated iron sheeting in the middle of the potato patch.

In an ideal world, online retailers would cater for all these options. Then practically no home delivery would fail. The trouble is, up to now no one has codified all the widely differing approaches to the problem, or formalised them in any way. What is a safe place? What is a drop-box? How does the retailer or carrier recognise these things?

Now IMRG is attempting to address this deficit: to define what a satisfactory delivery is, and specify which delivery solutions conform to it – not in detail, but in principle. Once the results are published, the idea is that retailers will be able to offer various delivery options from a list of possible solution types, comfortable in the knowledge that everyone more or less agrees what they mean.

You might ask why they need a standard to do what sounds a bit like common sense, and in fairness, some already do offer a range of delivery options. But others have been uneasy about various underlying issues – carrier liability, product liability, safety and fraud.

And despite constant exposure in magazines like ours for the past decade, a significant number of retailers still appear to be unaware that some of these solutions even exist.

Three cheers, then, for IMRG’s efforts, which sound like something the industry sorely needs. But it also needs more: a willingness to embrace delivery solutions, to promote them, to use them. Until it does, home shopping will be forever hobbled. Yet it needn’t be.