As retailers face compounding pressure on margins, increasing customer expectations and returns costs, the concept of lockers is beginning to matter for a much bigger reason than simple convenience, it’s becoming a core part of how retailers rethink the economics of delivery.
They’re increasingly being viewed as a way to make the last mile more efficient, improve delivery completion, reduce friction in returns and give customers more meaningful control at checkout. This shift comes at a time when the limitations of home delivery are becoming increasingly visible, with one in five UK consumers having experienced a parcel going missing from their doorstep.[1]
InPost’s latest research shows that 41% of UK consumers now receive parcels via lockers[2], highlighting how quickly the model is moving into the mainstream. That demand becomes even more pronounced at peak, with research commissioned by InPost in November 2025, revealing that 44% of consumers planned to use lockers for deliveries over the Christmas period, up from 34% just three months earlier.[3].
Retail Economics data, cited by InPost, points to more than 115 million retail parcels moving through lockers in the UK over 12 months[4]. Of those, 87 million were outbound deliveries and 28 million were returns. Among those shoppers who have used lockers in the past 12 months, the share of online orders they choose to collect via lockers rises from seven per cent to 17 per cent, putting lockers ahead of other out-of-home options.
For Peter Blackburn, International Commercial Director at InPost UK, the significance of parcel lockers isn’t simply that shoppers like them. It’s that they change the economics of fulfilment in ways retailers can’t ignore.
“There are a number of factors that impact the retailer end from a cost perspective, not just the consumer side,” he says. “With traditional home delivery, you’ve got the challenges around failed first attempts, the need for repeat deliveries, and the knock-on impact from a customer service post-purchase contact rate perspective, which can typically be higher than the cost of the parcel in the first instance.”
That is a crucial point. Retailers often compare delivery options too narrowly, focusing on the headline carrier cost while overlooking the wider operational drag created when deliveries go wrong. Failed first-time delivery, missed parcels, ‘where is my order?’ queries, claims of theft and repeated touchpoints with customer service all add cost well beyond the original shipment. With last-mile delivery representing a significant share of fulfilment costs, and 37% of consumers actively choosing lockers to avoid missed deliveries[5], these inefficiencies are becoming harder to ignore.
Blackburn argues that parcel lockers can help retailers get closer to the “true total cost” of delivery.
“Parcel lockers have the potential to improve delivery completion rates,” he says. “By nature of the fact that it’s an automated process, you get right-first-time delivery. It’s secure. You don’t have parcels left on a doorstep or in a ‘safe place’ that can then lead to theft.”
Retail is a market in which small operational gains can have an outsized commercial effect. For supply chain leaders under pressure to improve both service and margin, lockers increasingly look like a practical infrastructure decision.
A more consolidated last mile
The retail case for lockers also rests on consolidation. Instead of multiple doorstep drops across a residential area, carriers can deliver to a centralised location that serves many customers at once. That can improve route efficiency, reduce repeat journeys and create a more predictable delivery flow.
Blackburn says that point is becoming more important as retailers look beyond the sticker price of delivery and start thinking about end-to-end performance. “The market’s difficult right now for retailers and most businesses,” he says. “Small changes that can improve the top and bottom line for those businesses are quite critical.”
That pressure is helping to push lockers further into the mainstream. Convenience remains the consumer-facing message, but behind the scenes, retailers are increasingly interested in how lockers can support more reliable delivery outcomes and reduce downstream cost.
There’s also growing flexibility in how lockers fit into the delivery network. Blackburn points to the ability for consumers to divert parcels through an app journey, and to alternative models where a failed home delivery can be redirected to a nearby locker on a second attempt.
“That’s about giving consumers confidence that their delivery will arrive when they need it and be available at a convenient location nearby.”
This kind of flexibility shifts lockers from being a static option to a dynamic part of network design. In practice, lockers can support both planned and reactive fulfilment decisions, helping retailers build more resilience into the last mile.
Returns: the other half of the equation
If parcel lockers are becoming more important in outbound delivery, they’re arguably already well established in reverse logistics.
Returns remain one of the biggest pain points in retail supply chains, especially in categories such as fashion, where high return volumes are baked into the model. Returns create friction for customers, tie up inventory, delay resale and generate more service interactions.
For Blackburn, the starting point is convenience. “At the core of the returns experience is convenience, followed by the customer journey,” he says. “For the majority of returns, people in the UK are quite used to dropping those parcels off somewhere. But what we’ve found is that lockers have become increasingly popular as an easy, convenient solution for consumers.”
He argues that ease of use matters more than many retailers appreciate. Returns are rarely seen by shoppers as a brand-building moment, but they can quickly become a brand-damaging one if the process feels slow, confusing or cumbersome.
“With the right parcel locker user journey, that’s a completely label-less experience,” Blackburn says. “The consumer receives a QR code on the InPost app, walks to the locker, scans the QR code, the door opens, they put the parcel in, shut the door, and off they go.”
The appeal of that kind of frictionless process is particularly strong among younger shoppers. InPost’s research found that 66 per cent of Gen Z and 54 per cent of millennials used a parcel locker in the past year, while 52 per cent of Gen Z and 43 per cent of millennials use them at least once a month.[6]
Blackburn sees that as part of a wider behavioural shift.
“If you look at millennials, Gen Z, fast fashion shoppers, people buying high volumes of fashion items and then returning those that don’t fit or they don’t like, what they demand out of any process in their life is as little friction as possible,” he says. “They want something done through their mobile phone. They don’t want to queue. They don’t want to interact with people. They want to be there, done and gone.”
That doesn’t mean lockers are only relevant to younger consumers. As the network becomes more visible and more accessible, usage is spreading widely. InPost’s research suggests every age group expects to use lockers more over the next 12 months, with 39 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds saying they plan to use them even more this year.
For retailers, it’s clear that locker delivery is no longer a niche preference. It’s moving towards being a mainstream expectation.
The checkout problem
One of Blackburn’s most striking arguments is that parcel lockers are sometimes underused, not because demand is weak, but because the checkout experience is poorly designed.
“The real challenge we observe in the market is at checkout,” he says. “There’s a lot of research that demonstrates that consumers want options at checkout and that they want to choose things that are convenient for them. That gap is already impacting behaviour, with research showing that two in five UK shoppers abandon their online carts due to delivery concerns[7]. In many cases, consumer behaviour is moving faster than the delivery options retailers are presenting, creating a disconnect at the final stage of the journey”
Too often, he argues, delivery choices are buried, generic or overly defaulted towards home delivery, even when that may not be the most convenient option for the shopper or the most efficient option for the retailer.
“If you follow the ecommerce journey through, retailers spend a lot of money on a highly personalised process from the point of ‘how do I capture your attention’ through to ‘how do I get you to press buy’,” Blackburn says. “And then I take you into a delivery process that’s completely anonymised.”
If the shopping journey is highly personalised, but fulfilment choices are not, retailers risk undermining conversion, convenience and retention at the final hurdle. “You lose your choice at that point,” he says.
“It defaults quite heavily to home delivery, yet I might actively want to choose out-of-home because it’s the most convenient option for me, but you’re not making it easy for me to find it, or potentially you’re not even offering it.”
For supply chain teams, this is a reminder that fulfilment strategy isn’t only about network design or carrier management. It is also about how those options are surfaced to the customer. The supply chain and the digital customer journey are no longer separable disciplines.
From complementary to foundational
So, where does this go next?
Blackburn believes parcel lockers are moving from a complementary option to a foundational part of the delivery network. “I think it’s on the journey from being complementary to foundational,” he says. “It’s becoming increasingly a core pillar of a delivery network.”
Lockers already underpin a growing share of returns. Consumers are becoming more comfortable with them. Urban lifestyles favour them. Retailers need more efficient fulfilment models. And as checkout experiences improve, adoption is likely to grow further.
Blackburn says the logic is straightforward: “It already underpins a lot of the returns or reverse logistics journey. It’s not the biggest leap of faith to see it now start to underpin more of the outbound journey as well.”
That may prove to be the central role lockers play in the modern retail supply chain. Not as a novelty, and not simply as a more convenient option, but as a tool that helps retailers reduce delivery friction, improve completion, streamline returns and offer customers more control in a market where convenience and cost discipline have to coexist.
[1] InPost | Britain’s ‘delivery tax’: a broken delivery system
[2] InPost | Parcel lockers become the new favoured choice
[3] InPost | The Use of Parcel Lockers This Christmas
[4] Retail Economics February 2025
[5] InPost | The Use of Parcel Lockers This Christmas
[6] Retail Economics February 2025
[7] https://www.sendcloud.com/en-uk/blog/2-in-5-uk-shoppers-abandon-online-carts-over-delivery-concerns
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