Royal Mail trials Sunday parcel deliveries
Royal Mail is to work with major retailers on a trial of Sunday parcel deliveries as it looks to tap into the UK’s seven-day-a-week delivery market.
The company will be piloting the service with a number of retail brands in the next month and is also in discussions with further retailers about rolling out the service to their customers.
Royal Mail has revealed that it processed unprecedented parcel volumes in the quarter ending 27 December, with 496 million parcels delivered in the period. The company said it is responding to changing customer expectations for more frequent and convenient deliveries.
Nick Landon, chief commercial officer at Royal Mail, said: “The last year has reset so many customer expectations and the desire for even more convenient and even more frequent parcel deliveries has certainly been one of them. We always listen to our customers, both senders and recipients, and the ask here was clear: we love what you do Monday to Saturday, so please do the same on a Sunday. So that’s what we’re doing, as quickly as possible so we can offer it to more and more customers across the course of this year.”
The construction of Royal Mail’s second and largest parcel hub is now underway in Daventry in the Midlands. Once complete, the new hub will be the size of more than ten football pitches and have the capacity to process over one million parcels per day.