Over the past few days, more precisely on Tuesday 8 and Wednesday 9 October, Amazon Prime Day 2024, one of the most anticipated online shopping events of the year, took place.
Amazon Prime Days are indeed one of the main opportunities for eShoppers to grab products at heavily discounted prices, but also a crucial moment for eCommerce, which on these occasions have to handle higher than usual order volumes.
Amazon Prime Days therefore put logistics and deliveries in the spotlight, prompting more and more online shops to look for innovative solutions to ensure fast and efficient deliveries and easy, hassle-free returns.
In this article, we analyse all the available data related to Amazon Prime Day 2024 and provide you with some useful tips to optimise your shipment management. Let’s get started.
Amazon Prime Day 2024, global expectations
In 2023, Amazon set an unprecedented record: Prime users purchased 375 million items, with global sales of around USD 12.7 billion on Prime Days alone. In 2024, also considering the increase in the number of Amazon Prime subscribers and the growing consumer engagement with the initiative, expectations were correspondingly high.
Globally, sales were expected to increase by 11% compared to last year. Among the most popular sectors are consumer electronics, fashion and household products.
Although it is still too early to know whether the expectations turned out to be justified – it will still take a few days for the official data – what is certain is that online stores have had to cope with a sales spike in the past few days and, consequently, manage increased logistical pressure.
This situation concerns, of course, not only Amazon Prime Day, but in general the whole peak season of online sales, which runs from October until the sales at the beginning of January, the so-called Peak Season.
How to cope with it, then? Luckily, we have the solution that might suit you.
Lockers and Pick-up Points for efficient shipping
With the increasing volume of online orders during the Peak Season eCommerce – and beyond – the importance of efficient and scalable logistics solutions is becoming increasingly apparent. Lockers and Pick-Up Points are therefore fast becoming essential elements for online shops, as they respond to consumers’ growing demand for flexibility in advanced delivery options.
Indeed, eShoppers no longer want to be tied down to home delivery, with fixed hours and long waits. Locker and Pick-up Points offer the freedom for shoppers to pick up their purchases when they prefer, without the worry of being at home at the time of delivery. This solution not only makes life easier for customers, but also allows online stores to improve their logistical efficiency by reducing the number of failed deliveries and optimising shipping times.
Locker and Pick-up Points for efficient returns
But that’s not all. In addition to delivery management, Locker and Pick-up Points are also a practical, efficient and innovative answer to the problem of returns, which is particularly acute during events such as Prime Day.
As the volume of orders increases, the number of returns inevitably increases (impulse purchases, as we all know, are sometimes regretted). However, for many consumers the return process is a critical moment that affects their overall satisfaction with the online shopping experience. In other words, an eShopper tends to trust an online store more, and thus return to shop there in the future, if he or she can enjoy a positive return experience.
Lockers and Return Points offer a quick and intuitive solution to return products. Instead of having to wait for the courier or go to the post office, customers can simply drop off their parcel at the nearest Locker, with the convenience of being able to do so at any time of the day.
These solutions therefore allow for easier returns for both consumers and logistics operators, ensuring more streamlined and less costly processes for online stores.
Lockers and Pick-up Points: all advantages
To summarise, then, for eCommerce, the integration of Locker and Pick-up Points into their shipping systems is a strong advantage, firstly because they ensure greater customer satisfaction, who can thus enjoy more flexible and convenient delivery options; secondly, because these solutions help to reduce the operational costs associated with failed deliveries, which can be particularly costly. Locker and Pick-up Points, in fact, always guarantee 100 per cent of deliveries, and the courier can deposit parcels at a centralised pick-up point, optimising delivery routes and reducing travel time.
From a sustainability point of view, Locker and Pick-up Points also help to reduce the environmental impact of shipments. By consolidating deliveries to a single destination, the number of courier trips is reduced, thus lowering CO2 emissions and helping online stores achieve sustainability goals, which are increasingly important to consumers.
In short, eCommerce stores that do not integrate these solutions risk falling behind an increasingly prepared and customer-oriented competition. Lockers and pick-up points are not just a passing trend, but the future of eCommerce logistics.
If you too don’t want to fall behind, here’s what you need to do.
How to integrate a Network of Lockers and Pick-up Points to your online store
Thanks to GEL Proximity, you can quickly and easily integrate our Network of over 200,000 Pick-up Points and Lockers already active nationwide and internationally, for deliveries and returns, into your online store.
How? You can connect GEL Proximity using our dedicated libraries and APIs, or by downloading the module/plugin from the marketplace of your eCommerce software.
GEL Proximity is a Pay per Ship service, i.e. you only pay for what you ship when the customer chooses the pick-up option at a Locker or Pick-up Point.
