Drop-box solutions are gaining ground

An unattended delivery system for which Business Post now has the UK licence, called eBox, is on trial with several hundred customers.
Three sizes of eBox are available, taking deliveries or outbound shipments of up to 20kg. Business Post claims this makes the system suitable for the B2B sector as well as its HomeServe customers, such as service engineers and party planners. The company hopes by this means to reduce the problem of failed deliveries.
The secure boxes are anchored to a heavy concrete base, making theft difficult, and can be accessed only by the customer, using a credit card-sized access card, and the delivery driver, who enters a PIN number into a handheld scanner.
Inside the lid of each box is an electric monitoring system that records who opened the box and when, allowing Business Post to track activity. The system has been in use in Canada for six years.
Meanwhile , drop-box operator ByBox has passed the 14,000 secure boxes mark just five years after the company was founded.
Its boxes, which are in more than 600 UK locations, mainly used to hold parts and stock for mobile workers such as engineers and sales people. With this system, customers travel to a central location to pick up deliveries, but typically boxes are available within 5km of home, ByBox says.
Because its drivers deliver to the same boxes every night, the company claims it can meetpre-8am delivery targets 99.8% of the time.