Office deliveries
Around 40% of people in the UK now regularly use their professional address as a personal PO Box, according to the latest shopper insight data from Barclaycard. Barclaycard also found that a fifth (21%) of shoppers said their online retail habits have doubled or tripled in the last three years.
Other UK online shopper trends detected Barclaycard included:
• Almost one in ten now get a daily delivery sent to their work address (8%)
• Books are the number one online purchase sent to the office (47%)
• More men (33%) than women use their professional address as a way of hiding purchases from a partner
• A fifth of men admit to getting make-up delivered to work (20%)
• Desk snacks – one in ten even get their weekly shopping delivered to work (12%)
• Nottingham shoppers are the most click happy with 29% getting daily deliveries sent to work.
Barclaycard commented: “British shoppers now spend more than £100 billion online every year , with the weekend – Saturday afternoon and Friday and Sunday evenings in particular – the most popular time for consumers to indulge in online retail therapy. In fact, our preference for online ordering has helped boost the size of the UK parcel market to almost £9bn , leading our corporate mail rooms to increasingly act as our private post offices.”
The Barclaycard research found that 16% of respondents said that they opted for deliveries at the office because they no longer have a private letter box. Half of all respondents (51%) said they can’t take the time off work to go to a collection office if they miss a delivery.
Commenting on the findings, Marc Pettican, Managing Director at Barclaycard, said: “We all love the speed and ease of shopping online and this is especially true over the Bank Holiday weekend when we’ve got an extra day to shop. There’s no denying how handy it is to get our deliveries sent to the work place, so much so that people working in post rooms will likely be feeling quite rushed off their feet.”
Pettican added: “With online shopping continuing to increase in popularity, this post room boom looks here to stay.”
