E-commerce home delivery market could grow by US$540 billion by 2025, Metapack report predicts

More than US$650 billion of non-food spending will shift online by 2025, with US$540 billion of this predicted to be home deliveries, a new report from delivery management technology provider Metapack has revealed.

The Ecommerce Delivery Benchmark report, which was undertaken in partnership with research consultancy Retail Economics, was launched during The Delivery Conference (TDC) 2022 held earlier this week and highlights how a new wave of ‘digital shifters’ and home working during the global pandemic will support significant growth in the e-commerce and delivery sectors.

The report covers more than 6,000 consumers across four countries, including the US, UK, France, and Germany. In the UK, online is expected to account for 49.7% of total non-food sales by 2025 amid persistent home working. For the US this figure is 30.6%, while for Germany and France it is 28.2% and 32.3%, respectively.

Delivery cost, speed and convenience

The report also highlighted consumers’ top priorities for delivery when shopping online. The cost of delivery is the most important factor to shoppers (27.4%), with speed (26.6%) and convenience (23%) second and third. And while sustainability is rising on many people’s agendas, only 6.9% considered the carbon footprint of their delivery important when shopping online.

According to the report, 58% of consumers are more willing to delay delivery times for a greener delivery than they are to pay to offset the environmental impact of delivery. Younger consumers, meanwhile, are twice as likely to pay to offset delivery emissions compared to the 55+ age group. Across all four countries, around a third of shoppers would switch from home to out-of-home delivery if it was cheaper.

Duncan Licence, VP of Global Product at Metapack, said: “Driven by the pandemic, online consumer shopping expectations have changed significantly over the past few years, and a lot of these changes are here to stay. Our new report takes a closer look at these developments and their lasting impact on both consumers and retailers. It is expected that, as home working becomes the norm for more and more people, their appetite for fast, convenient, and easy deliveries that fit their lifestyle, will continue to increase.”

New tracking and intelligence products

Metapack also used TDC 2022 to launch two new products – the Metapack Tracking API and Metapack Intelligence. The tracking API converts carrier delivery events into consistent updates for customer and service agents. It provides a single source of tracking data for customers and “removes all of the complexity and jargon”, according to Metapack. The company also noted that the new API can help cut customer queries by 35%.

Meanwhile, Metapack Intelligence gives customers visibility and control of their delivery experience, helping to meet their consumers’ needs. It enables retailers to analyse their entire shipping operation to streamline dispatches and improve delivery success.

Metapack Intelligence has three offerings – Entry, Advanced and Premium. Entry is offered free-of-charge to all Delivery Manager customers and provides operational reporting and parcel volume data to help merchants manage the customer experience. Advanced gives shippers visibility and control over the customer delivery experience, both in the warehouse and with carriers, so they can identify and address patterns that are impacting the customer delivery promise. Premium, meanwhile, enables complex enterprise shippers to manage multiple brands, to import their own data and to create customer reports so they can better manage the complexity of operating a diverse final mile network.

Metapack Entry and Advanced are available now, and Premium will be available later in 2022.

Delivery experience expectations

This year TDC was held in a virtual format and attracted around 1,500 people from 70 countries to discuss the future of e-commerce delivery. Speakers came from leading delivery and retail firms including UPS, Amazon Shipping, FedEx, DPD UK, APG eCommerce Solutions, ASOS, and Hived.

The overall theme of the event was how the delivery experience has changed following the Covid-19 global pandemic. Speakers discussed how consumer expectations have changed with personalisation and convenience now extremely important considerations for delivery experience and sustainability increasing in significance, especially as the next generation of shoppers come online.

Amazon focus areas

“As e-commerce continues to grow over the months and years our focus is on trust and transparency,” said Amanda Whiteside, Head of Customer Programs at Amazon Shipping during the ‘Ecommerce delivery of the future’ session.

“We see a lot of innovation coming from reliability and sustainability, while still remembering that there is a core shipping service that we need to deliver for our customers. Beyond that, we are really encouraged by thinking about ways to delight our customers and finding new ways to provide an enhanced tracking experience so we can deliver that transparency to them.”

UPS convenience and choice

Speaking about successful e-commerce delivery in the future during the ‘Succeeding in an e-commerce-first economy’ session, Pablo Ramos, Director of Strategy Europe at UPS, pointed out: “Convenience and choice are key for the consumer. We need to make sure we offer different options for different consumers. Not everyone lives in the same environment, some people live downtown, some in rural areas, and with this in mind, I think we will need to grow into very detailed, on-demand services for the different consumers in different locations. This is going to be key in the future to make sure that every customer is satisfied with the experience and to keep customers loyal to brands.”

Next year The Delivery Conference will return to the in-person format and will be held in London at the Royal Lancaster Hotel on February 7, 2023.