Surprise Christmas gifts, here’s how

NoChristmas has truly arrived and we are all ready for the traditional rush for gifts, but let’s not forget that even if we all expect it by now, it is always nice to receive a surprise, something unexpected and magnificent. If the city shops continue to be crowded, even the windows on the web are increasingly appetizing, offering us unmissable opportunities and very fast deliveries. However, packages delivered to our homes do not always end up in the right hands, risking ruining the surprise effect that should always accompany our gifts.

For this reason, when we rely on shipments, it is always a good idea to choose the right operator, the one capable of guaranteeing fast times, quality of service and above all privacy. If you think that such a service doesn’t exist, we are here to prove you wrong.

Christmas gifts online, how not to ruin the surprise?

The gifts under the tree are beautiful, but before arriving under the branches of our green fir trees the road is long and sometimes tortuous, especially if we think about online purchases, which have increased greatly in recent years. Research, orders, shipments, scheduled and rescheduled deliveries, a real Christmas job that requires time and patience.

Let’s think, for example, of gifts for children who, as we know, are the absolute protagonists of Christmas. The task of relatives and parents every year is to defend the sacrosanct legend of Santa Claus. The stratagems to avoid being discovered become more and more challenging: packages hidden everywhere at home, or at the grandparents’, and little excuses to go out and buy that last gift. However, with the now consolidated habit of online gifts, it is important to ensure that the delivered packages do not end up in the hands of the interested little ones. Today there is a safe way that helps us manage our purchases on the web. It’s about InPost, a secure shipping system that allows us to collect our purchases outside the home and therefore not ruin the surprise effect.

The steps to avoid making mistakes are few and simple: we carefully choose the perfect Christmas gift from one of over 120 online shops that use the service InPost for their deliveries, we select shipping with InPost, we choose the most convenient collection point for us and we always stay updated thanks to the notifications with which we will also receive the collection code.

In this way we will decide how to carry out the collection, in total freedom and according to our needs, avoiding the unpleasant inconvenience of the recipient of our gift receiving the courier at home or, even worse, that our package is inadvertently opened by sending all our plans up in the air.

Who is InPost

InPost is a company founded in Poland in 1999 which has been engaged for over 20 years in the development of technological and innovative solutions for the delivery of goods.

Already in 2009, sensing future consumption trends, InPost decides to specialize in the production of lockers that allow collection and delivery outside the home 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Today InPost is present in 9 markets and is among the European leaders in last mile management.

InPost is the only operator in Italy specialized exclusively in the out-of-home channel. In fact, deliveries only take place at the almost 6,000 collection points throughout the country including Lockers, automatic lockers, and InPost Points, i.e. collection points hosted at local businesses.

InPost’s success is mainly due to the technologies it uses. Everything is digitalized in order to offer an impeccable customer experience.

InPost also has an always active customer service thanks to “Sole”, the virtual assistant available on the site. Sole provides support on services, such as information on how to make a shipment through a locker, information on tracking, and also allows you to recover the pin to collect your shipment if it has been lost. The virtual assistant uses artificial intelligence to answer the customer’s questions and aims to make them autonomous in solving problems in the shortest time possible.

If something went wrong or there was a last minute change of heart InPost ensures a made easy. All it takes is a few clicks and you don’t need to print anything. You will receive via email or text message a QR code and return code to use at the locker or at an InPost Point to make the return.

Italians and online purchases

The pandemic has certainly changed the purchasing habits of Italians. If before we still looked with suspicion at online purchases, after Covid we instead started buying gifts online for Christmas and beyond. According to a Coldiretti survey we are talking about a percentage of 54%.

What orients consumers towards online purchases is above all the possibility of comparing prices in real time. With the advent of smart working then, and with the possibility of receiving anything at home at any time, couriers are now regular visitors to our homes.

Unfortunately, deliveries don’t always work on the first try. The lack of a doorman in all condominiums, the need to leave the house at any time to do the shopping, the return of many to the office after widespread smart working and many other factors, increase the cases of “recipient absent on delivery”. And it is precisely here that out-of-home delivery, also permitted by InPost, comes into play to optimize deliveries, guarantee success on the first attempt and, consequently, reduce the environmental impact on double or even triple deliveries resulting from failure of the first.

With InPost, surprise Christmas gifts are also sustainable

InPost is also sustainable. According to Agcom research, the rate of parcels not delivered on the first attempt is medium-high, significantly impacting costs and above all environmental sustainability. At Christmas all this increases. There is certainly an ever-increasing consumer awareness of the environmental impact, including that relating to shopping. Many consumers choose locally sourced gifts, preferring brands that pay particular attention to sustainability. It therefore becomes necessary for this attention to also extend to the logistics and delivery phase.

The alternatives already exist and are precisely the lockers, the automatic lockers now present all over the world, or the commercial activities that host the collection points.

Shipping to collection points reduces traffic up to 10 times compared to a normal home delivery and also affects the reduction of CO2 emissions, noise pollution and road accidents.
InPost has calculated that delivering 1000 packages a day to a locker saves 76% on fuel. However, if a locker is removed, 13 vans will have to get back on the road for home deliveries.

Furthermore, from this point of view, Italy is still a little behind the rest of Europe: according to the latest E-commerce Italy 2023 report by Casaleggio Associati, only 6% of companies are attentive to sustainability in the transport sector. The 17th has a CO2 reduction target. 8% have obtained certifications in this area. Only 3% believe that sustainability can contribute to economic growth.

It is therefore time to think even more actively about how environmental impact is important for all activities and depends on everyone, private individuals and companies.

Let’s therefore take advantage of Christmas to experiment with this system even more. Not only for sustainability but also to better organize our deliveries and surprises. Remember, InPost guarantees respect for privacy and therefore the surprise effect, preventing our loved ones from discovering the gifts we have purchased for them ahead of time.

This Christmas, then, let’s give ourselves a gift: choose deliveries to the locker or to InPost collection points and give a hand to the WOW effect and the environment.

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