Amazon Teams Up With The Post Office To Ensure No Late Deliveries This Christmas

Online shoppers will be able to pick up their purchases from Post Office branches around the country following the signing of a new deal with ecommerce powerhouse Amazon.

The online retail giant has agreed to add the Post Office’s 10,500 UK branches to its existing PickUp Locations service, which allows customers to pick up items they’ve bought online.

This takes the number of Amazon PickUp Locations to more than 16,000 in the UK.

Pick up and go

Post Office branches can now be selected as a preferred Pickup Location during the checkout step of shopping, with users just needing to present identification at the branch to receive their parcel.

Delivery to Post Offices branches is free for Amazon Prime members, but the rest of us will be charged First Class delivery rates.

Amazon says that deliveries made to Amazon Pickup Locations nationally have more than tripled in the last year as customers continue to enjoy the convenience that they provide.

“Customers can collect their Amazon orders from over 16,000 Pickup Locations across the UK,” said Christopher North, Managing Director of Amazon.co.uk Ltd. “Pickup Locations have become the delivery method of choice for many shoppers. Offering the collection of packages from Post Offices is another great way of providing our customers with the highest levels of convenience.”

The announcement is the latest move by Amazon to expand its delivery options throughout the world. Last month, it announced it would be launching its first ‘real-world’ shop in New York, which is expected to sell and display Amazon’s growing product portfolio including its Kindle line of e-readers and tablets, Fire smartphones and video-streaming boxes.

The store will also apparently have a mini-warehouse to support same-day delivery, returns and order pickups within New York.

The company is also notably looking into delivery by unmanned drone, with CEO Jeff Bezos saying that it hopes to launch a service by 2018. The unmanned Amazon ‘octocopters’ can carry up to five pounds (2.3 kg) of cargo from the company’s distribution centres to customer homes.

But the move is Amazon’s latest expansion of its UK business. Last month, it announced plans to hire over a thousand new staff at its distribution centres throughout the country, taking its total UK workforce to around 7,000. This includes workers at a major new office in Principal, a £500m site situated between Liverpool Street and Shoreditch High Street stations in the east of the capital.

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