What is a parcel locker and how to receive an order. Box of all trades: how to make money on parcel terminals. How does the PickPoint network of parcel terminals work?
The first parcel terminal was installed on November 29, 2010 in Moscow in the Moscow City International Business Center in the Tower 2000 building (on Bagrationovsky Bridge).
History of Postamat
November 29, 2010 - this date is considered the date of opening of the parcel terminal network in Russia. Russia entered the TOP 10 countries introducing an automated method of payment and receipt of goods ordered remotely. The parcel terminal for Russia was specially designed taking into account the possibility of paying not only with plastic cards, but also with cash (built-in bill acceptor).
Technology of using parcel terminals
When placing an order in an online store or from a catalog, the user is offered the delivery method “via Postamat”. When placing an order with this delivery method, the user is asked to indicate the most convenient location of the parcel locker. When an order arrives at the selected parcel locker, the user receives an SMS notification with an individual code to open the box with the order. When receiving an order on the control panel of the parcel locker, the user must enter the code received via SMS and pay for the goods in cash or with a plastic card at the parcel locker, after which the box with the ordered goods will open.
Features and benefits of Postamat
The service of a network of parcel terminals makes it possible to pay for orders both in cash and with a plastic card directly at the terminal.
Many users today also use this network in order to save time and effort: there is no need to wait for the courier at home or at work, or stand in queues at post offices. When using parcel machines, the process of receiving orders along with payment takes a maximum of 1 minute. As a consequence, it can be stated that this type services are in demand among business and busy people of megalopolises and big cities with an active lifestyle and modern views on innovation.
Post offices are located in shopping centers next to grocery supermarkets in order to combine daily purchases of groceries and clothing with the receipt of goods ordered remotely.
The return function has also been developed and is already applicable in practice, so if the buyer does not like the product, he can immediately return it to the Postamat (If he has previously activated the Return service).
Very often, parcel terminals freeze when trying to receive an order, so it is highly not recommended to receive important and especially prepaid orders through them. Perhaps in the future, after the removal of unqualified personnel from Pickpoint, the situation may improve.
More information about receiving change
When paying in cash, Postamat does not issue change in cash, but there are 3 ways to credit change:
- Enter the change amount into your mobile phone;
- Transfer the amount of change to your QIWI wallet;
- Receive change in cash at the company office;
- Credit the change to your personal account in the online store (if the online store provides this type of service).
The recipient is always given a second check indicating the change has been credited.
Creating a network of parcel terminals where buyers of books, boots and sex toys can pick up their goods looks like a good business idea. But without enlisting the support of a large logistics operator, you shouldn’t undertake this.
Over five years of operation, PickPoint (in the photo - company director Nadezhda Romanova) managed to create the country's largest network of parcel terminals (Photo: Oleg Yakovlev / RBC)
How did they come up with
The idea to create a network of parcel terminals in Russia - automated points for issuing orders - was visited by commercial director SPSR Express company Nadezhda Romanova at the Post Expo 2009 exhibition in Hannover, where she saw parcel pickup terminals developed by KEBA for Deutsche Post. In June 2010, Network of Automated Pickup Points LLC was established, which began operating under the PickPoint brand. “The technology interested us because automatic equipment has better productivity and cost than classic pick-up points,” recalls the head of PickPoint, Nadezhda Romanova, who left SPSR Express.
Investments in PickPoint amounted to $10 million. They were invested by SPSR Express shareholders - venture funds and several private investors. “The company was immediately created as a separate business project,” says Romanova. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, Network of Automated Pickup Points LLC is now 100% owned by the Cypriot PickPoint Delivery Sistem Ltd. Among its co-owners there is only one individual - Oleg Tsarkov, managing partner of Svarog Capital Advisors, who has 15%. ABOUT n refused to communicate with RBC for this article. Other co-owners are companies registered in the British Virgin Islands; their beneficiaries are unknown. The largest co-owner of PickPoint Delivery Sistem with a share of 43% is Festina Trading Ltd, aka largest co-owner of SPSR Express with a share of 40%.
In 2010, the fast-growing online retail market lacked companies that focused on delivering purchases to individuals. “At that time, many online stores created their own courier services - it was a necessary measure,” recalls Romanova. But, according to her, courier delivery has several disadvantages: firstly, the need to negotiate with the client about the delivery time, which cannot always be done promptly, which means the deadlines are delayed. Secondly, in large cities it is very difficult to ensure that the courier arrives on time. “As a result, the quality of the service suffers, and the cost of the service itself increases,” explains Romanova.
The founders of PickPoint were also not interested in opening their own network of pick-up points (POPs): someone there has to work 12-14 hours a day, while parcels are most actively picked up, as a rule, in the morning and evening. “The cost of issuing an order through a parcel locker is 30-50% lower than through a pick-up point,” says Romanova. “In Russia, unskilled labor is paid very modestly, so the economics of a pick-up point can be no less profitable than the economics of a parcel terminal due to the rather high cost of automated terminals,” retorts Tatyana Yampolskaya, general director of the Hermes express delivery company.
Pickpoint in numbers
1455 pick-up points in the PickPoint network
More 3 million items were delivered via PickPoint in 2015
2.2 million people — number of unique PickPoint users
3.4 thousand rubles.— average cost of an order delivered via PickPoint
1.2 kg— average weight of one parcel
120 cells— the size of an average parcel terminal in Moscow, 80 cells in other regions
40 thousand items per day were delivered via PickPoint in December 2015
Source: company data
PickPoint offered three global manufacturers parcel lockers — Austrian KEBA, Polish InPost and Estonian Smart Post (now Cleveron) to finalize their models in order to enter the Russian market. “European terminals did not have the payment options we needed, since orders there prepay , whereas in Russia they like to pay upon receipt, mostly in cash,” says Romanova. “In addition, the standard height of cells in the EU is 8 cm, but our parcels are higher in height - 10-15 cm.” The Estonians became interested in the project: they provided parcel lockers with the possibility of payment by plastic cards, software they were written about in Russia. 115 were purchased in Estonia parcel lockers , then their production was established in Russia.
How we launched
At the time of the opening of the first terminal on November 29, 2010 in Moscow City, PickPoint had signed about 40 agreements with online stores. The largest of them were the cosmetics manufacturer Yves Rocher, which already worked with SPRS Express and delivered orders through parcel terminals in its native France, as well as the online clothing store Wildberries. Currently, delivery through PickPoint is actively used by over 2 thousand companies, including Otto Group, LaModa, Oriflame and Ozon. At the start, as Romanova recalls, there were, of course, problems: a young company offering a delivery method previously unknown to the client. But gradually all the largest Russian online stores and even foreign ones that send goods to Russia began to use parcel machines (Chinese Ali Express and JD.com accounted for 6% of PickPoint’s orders in 2015).
For sex shops, delivery through parcel terminals has become a revolution. “Many of our clients are embarrassed to choose courier delivery or go to retail store“says Yulia Atroshchenko, senior manager of the He and She chain of intimate goods stores, which has been cooperating with PickPoint for four years.
However, parcel terminals also have disadvantages: they do not allow you to hold the goods in your hands before buying. “This delivery method does not involve a fitting service before purchase, which means it cannot be the only one for the fashion segment in e-commerce,” Lamoda managing director Florian Jansen told RBC. Despite this, 38% of parcels delivered through PickPoint in 2015 were clothing and footwear.
It was much more difficult to persuade landlords than sellers, recalls Romanova. At first shopping centers were suspicious of parcel terminals and did not want to rent out space for them, although the standard parcel locker for 80 cells it occupies only 4 square meters. m . “Many even viewed us as a threat to traffic: they say, why would people buy on the Internet and not in a shopping center?” - says Romanova. It wasn't until 2013, when the technology became popular, that shopping centers saw parcel lockers competitive advantage. "They realized that parcel lockers can work as a payment terminal and generate new customers,” says Romanova ( parcel locker accepts payments not only for parcels, but also for cellular communication etc.). True, now the shopping center is not the main lessor for PickPoint: about 65% parcel lockers installed in supermarkets. “We are more interested in stores where a person goes to buy bread, milk and at the same time picks up his parcel - a place that is on the way home,” explains Romanova. According to her, the busiest parcel lockers are located in residential areas.
How does it workPickPoint
Connecting a small online store to PickPoint is quite simple: you need to conclude an agreement and embed a shopping cart module on the site, which takes an average of 1.5-2 hours of programmer work. When placing an order, the buyer selects a convenient parcel locker or a partner delivery point for orders. Every evening via partner courier PickPoint Services picks up all of its orders from the online store and brings it to the sorting center on Volgogradsky Prospekt, where 50 of the company’s 120 employees work. At night, shipments are sorted by direction and either transferred to mainline delivery or with the help of partner courier services early in the morning they are delivered to parcel terminals and delivery points in Moscow and the Moscow region.
At the time of loading into the parcel locker or delivery to the point of delivery, the consumer is sent an SMS, email or push notification that his order has been delivered, and is also informed of the storage period, operating hours of the point, amount to pay, etc. Delivery times vary: in Moscow and the Moscow region The goods are placed in the parcel locker, as a rule, the next day after dispatch from the store; in other regions this period is from three days. The goods are stored on average for three days, however, if the client did not have time to pick up the order, the parcel locker can extend the storage period at the point or redirect it to another point.
In addition, it turned out that customers who receive parcels at pickup points and at terminals are different the target audience: the former are older, more conservative and do not always trust technology, while the latter are younger, more mobile and do not want to waste time on unnecessary communication. PickPoint decided to cooperate with independent networks of pick-up points (Maxima Express, Boxberry) and Rostelecom, allowing connected online stores to deliver goods not only to parcel terminals, but also to pick-up points. At the end of 2015, there were already 715 such partner pickup points, and 740 parcel terminals.
In 2015, PickPoint delivered more than 3 million items (an increase of 1.66 times compared to 2014). The company does not disclose financial indicators. “We reached payback in the fall of 2014,” explains Romanova. Several online stores in Moscow cooperating with PickPoint stated that the basic tariff for delivery to a post office in the capital is 236 rubles for a client, and to the regions it is more expensive, depending on the weight and distance. If all 3 million items were delivered to PickPoint in Moscow, the company’s revenue would have been at least 700 million rubles. excluding services for picking up goods and accepting payments. The company's revenue in 2015 is close to 1 billion rubles, its press service confirmed to RBC.
Don't try this again
Over five years of operation, PickPoint managed to create the largest network of parcel terminals in the country. According to J’son & Partners, PickPoint holds approximately 50-60% of the parcel terminal market in Russia. “PickPoint’s leadership in the market is explained by the fact that the shareholders of SPSR Express, the largest express delivery service in Russia, invested in the project,” says J’son & Partners expert Evgeny Itsakov. “In fact, PickPoint grew on the basis of the SPSR network: the company did not become a leader, it immediately had a leadership position and has maintained it to this day.”
Soon after PickPoint, the InPost networks (a joint venture between Qiwi and the Polish InPost), as well as Logibox, entered the market in Russia, but none of them reached O better success. According to several market participants, the Logibox network is struggling. An RBC correspondent was convinced that its website was not loading and its phones were not working. InPost opened 380 points (as of June 2015, the second largest network, after PickPoint). InPost CEO Andrey Chechin explains that launching a project in the parcel terminal market without very close partnerships with logistics companies impossible. InPost works with SDEK, DPD, Pony Express. “We need integration of logistics processes and information systems, and this is a costly, time-consuming business and requires resources to maintain,” warns Chechin.
“Our colleagues faced the same problems as we did, relying on partners, and were also unable to solve the main problem - effective long-distance delivery,” explains Romanova. About 70% of mainline delivery for PickPoint is carried out by SPSR Express (at market rates, Romanova emphasizes).
The prospects for the use of parcel terminals are associated not only with the growth Russian market online commerce (severely slowed down due to the crisis), but also with the introduction of the ability for ordinary citizens to send parcels through them. Romanova says that PickPoint has technically been able to accept parcels from individuals for a long time in favor of other individuals, but it all comes down to client identification. “Otherwise drug trafficking will go through the network, and we don’t need that,” she explains. A clear and simple technology for client identification has not yet been invented in Russia, and the method that Logibox implemented in collaboration with Russian Post did not work. “They offered clients to issue a special bank card to use parcel terminals to send parcels is very difficult,” says Romanova. Parcel machines can become an alternative to Russian Post for sending parcels from one private person to another, says Alexey Fedorov, president of the Association of Internet Trade Companies. InPost is already thinking about launching such a service in Russia, said its head Chechin.
Unhappy together
PickPoint developed networks of parcel terminals in Moscow and cities with a population of over a million, and gave regional capitals and smaller cities to partners who worked with PickPoint under an agency agreement. At the beginning of 2013, the company, which at that time had 440 parcel terminals, made plans to deliver 6.5 thousand terminals. But it didn’t work out: “It turned out that there are not so many places and such partners in the regions,” explains Nadezhda Romanova. Of the 740 parcel terminals, 210 belong to PickPoint partners. “This is a business for the lazy: agents buy equipment, sign a lease, install a parcel locker, connect it to the Internet and electricity, and largely forget about it,” says Romanova. — Next we connect them to single network, we carry out all logistics processes, carry out all payment acceptance through our module and pay the agent for issuing the order.”
Romanova refused to disclose the financial terms of the partnership, but RBC found a 2013 presentation that tells potential agents about the terms of cooperation. The cost of a parcel locker with 58 cells in the document is estimated at 600 thousand rubles., and the agent’s remuneration is in 65 rub. for the delivery of each item. The company claims that the current payback occurs in 3-6 months, and the return on investment is within two years.
But, according to Romanova, the bet on agents did not pay off: many of them did not study the traffic of places for installing terminals well, and spent a long time looking for suitable premises: “There were cases that it took 4-5 months from the sale of the terminal to the start of its operation.” The agent with whom RBC spoke is also dissatisfied: “An unprofitable business: sometimes the commission does not cover rental costs,” complains Andrey Mershiev from Novorossiysk, who became a PickPoint partner in early 2014. “It’s easier to put money on deposit in a bank.”
