Why a multi-carrier strategy wins every time
| What's Changed? | The New Normal | Single or multi carrier? |
|---|---|---|
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Three of the country’s biggest delivery networks changed hands or combined in little more than a year: |
Parcel lockers and click & collect points have become a genuine first choice for Gen Z and Millennial shoppers. |
The businesses that win won’t be the ones locked into a single carrier relationship. |
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• Royal Mail’s parent company, International Distribution Services, was acquired by EP Group
• Evri merged with DHL eCommerce UK
• InPost bought Yodel
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Shoppers want clarity and reassurance at every stage of the journey, not just a fast, cheap delivery. |
They’ll be the ones with a partner who can look across the whole network and answer one question, every time: how do we get the right product, to the right person, via the right network, at the lowest cost and best possible experience? |
The past 18 months have brought some of the biggest shake-ups the UK parcel delivery market has seen in years. Royal Mail’s parent company, International Distribution Services, was acquired by EP Group. [1] Evri merged with DHL eCommerce UK. [2] InPost bought Yodel. [3] Three of the country’s biggest delivery networks changed hands or combined in little more than a year.
For retailers, e-commerce businesses and brands running promotional or fulfilment campaigns, this isn’t background noise. It’s a shift in how parcels move around the UK, who controls that movement, and what customers now expect when they order something online.
Here’s what’s changed, and why it matters for how you plan delivery going forward.
Consolidation is creating fewer, bigger players
The headline story is consolidation. Evri’s merger with DHL eCommerce UK created a combined operation handling well over a billion parcels a year, bringing DHL’s UK Mail business and stronger international reach under one roof. InPost’s acquisition of Yodel paired its parcel locker network with Yodel’s home-delivery capability, making InPost the UK’s third-largest independent e-commerce logistics carrier virtually overnight.
Meanwhile Royal Mail, freshly under EP Group ownership, is trying to pivot from a letters-first business to a parcels-first one, while defending its share against Evri, DPD, Amazon and InPost, all at once.
The result is a market moving from a “Royal Mail versus everyone else” dynamic towards a smaller number of large, full-service carrier groups, each with broader capabilities but also broader, more complex commercial priorities of their own.
Out-of-home (OOH) delivery has gone mainstream
Parcel lockers and click & collect points have stopped being a fallback for missed deliveries and become a genuine first choice, particularly for younger shoppers. For the carriers it represents lower delivery costs and higher first-time delivery success, with the added benefit of consumer convenience and carbon footprint savings. According to the latest ecommerce research by Whistl, over half of frequent Gen Z and Millennial shoppers now use lockers regularly. [4]
Consumers want the flexibility to collect parcels on their own terms like on their commute, near to work or simply at a time that suits them, and lockers can meet that need. The crossover into returns is just as striking: 41% of Gen Z and 34% of Millennials now prefer lockers for returns, compared with just 9% of Baby Boomers, who still default to the Post Office or an in-store return. [5]
This isn’t about lockers replacing home delivery. Home delivery is still used by almost every online shopper. It’s about choice: the strongest delivery strategies now blend home delivery with OOH options, letting customers pick what suits them.
Cost and speed are no longer enough on their own
It used to be that price and delivery speed decided most carrier conversations. That’s no longer the full picture. Recent research shows UK shoppers now rank a clear returns policy as the single most important delivery factor (57%), ahead of cost (55%) and tracking visibility (51%). [6] Shoppers want clarity and reassurance at every stage of the journey, not just a fast, cheap delivery.
Frequent buyers are reshaping the value equation further. For customers ordering multiple times a week, reliability and real-time visibility often matter more than shaving a day off delivery or a few pence off cost. Not every customer segment wants the same thing from the same delivery, which has real implications for how a delivery proposition should be built.
Why single-carrier strategies no longer hold up
With carriers becoming more specialised rather than less, no single network can be the right answer for every parcel. Evri tends to win on low-cost consumer parcels, InPost on locker delivery, DHL on international and business shipments, DPD on premium timed delivery, and Royal Mail and Whistl on mail and lighter packets. Relying on one carrier for everything increasingly means compromising somewhere, on cost, on service, or on customer experience.
A multi-carrier approach lets businesses match the right carrier to the right shipment: optimising cost without sacrificing experience, matching service level to customer expectation, expanding delivery choice, and building in resilience for peak periods or network disruption. That’s a meaningfully harder thing to manage well than it was five years ago, particularly as B2B customers increasingly expect the same tracking, notifications and self-service that consumers get from Amazon.
How MRM protects costs and service quality
This is exactly the environment where a fulfilment and logistics partner earns its value, not by being tied to one carrier, but by sitting above the whole network and making the right call for each shipment, campaign and customer.
At MRM, that means:
- Carrier-neutral advice. Rather than defaulting to a single carrier relationship, we work with our partners to choose the best carrier mix for each campaign, geography, SKU profile and service requirement
- True multi-carrier routing. As carriers specialise further, intelligent routing across networks, rather than loyalty to one, is what protects cost and service quality at the same time
- Reverse logistics built in. With returns now a genuine competitive factor and lockers reshaping how customers send things back, we treat outbound and returns as one connected proposition, not an afterthought
- Visibility that meets consumer-grade expectations. Live tracking, self-service and clear reporting aren’t a nice-to-have anymore, they’re what our clients’ own customers expect as standard
- International reach from a single partner. As cross-border and marketplace-driven volumes keep growing, and navigating administration and tariffs becomes ever more challenging, campaigns increasingly need one partner who can deploy across the UK and Europe without adding complexity
Why a multi-carrier strategy wins every time
The UK carrier market has moved from pure delivery competition to something closer to ecosystem competition. Carriers are now competing on networks, lockers, returns, technology and international reach, as much as on the parcel itself. That’s good news for shippers, in principle, but it also means the decision of “which carrier” has become genuinely harder to get right on your own.
Our view is simple: the businesses that win over the next few years won’t be the ones locked into a single carrier relationship. They’ll be the ones with a partner who can look across the whole network and answer one question, every time: how do we get the right product, to the right person, via the right network, at the lowest cost and best possible experience?
That’s the role MRM plays for our clients, and it’s more valuable in a consolidated, fragmented market than it’s ever been.
If your delivery strategy still leans on a single carrier relationship or hasn’t been reviewed since the last round of consolidation, now is the moment to change that.
Get in touch with the MRM team to talk through your current carrier mix and where a multi-carrier, network-led approach could cut costs, improve service and build in more resilience for your business. We’d love to help you navigate what comes next.