Burntwood Grange Road near London's Wandsworth Common may not appear a likely location for an experiment in 21st-century shopping. But the leafy cul-de-sac is the site of a pilot scheme that, if successful, could alter the landscape of every street in the country.
About a month ago, a number of smart aluminium boxes, roughly the size of picnic hampers, began to appear on the doorsteps of the road's 1950s townhouses. The boxes belong to Homeport, an internet start-up that thinks it has found the answer to the biggest problem in home shopping: how to deliver goods to our homes when we are out at work.
According to the Post Office, home shopping on the internet is about to explode. A recent internal survey predicted that more than six million of us would have shopped online by the new year. In the run up to Christmas, the Post Office allowed 1,000 of its high-street counters to be used as pick-up points for goods ordered over the net. And if the postie can't help you, no worries: companies as diverse as Express Dairies and Pizza Hut are vying for a slice of the home-delivery pie.
Still, the main thing restraining internet shopping is that most people want their goods at the same time - between seven and eight in the evening. But, for a part-time antiques dealer and full-time mother like Melissa Foks, being in at a set time is not always an option. So, although she had never shopped online before, she volunteered to be one of the first to try out the Homeport system.
Homeport sells a small metal panel (measuring 12cm by 15cm) that is bolted to the side of your house. This houses three "ports" to which the cables that secure Homeport's delivery boxes can be attached.
My Homeport was delivered last week. Four deep holes had to be drilled into the side of my flat, but the installation took only five minutes. I ordered aproximately £60 worth of shopping via the internet, and when I came home from work the following lunchtime, an aluminium box was waiting for me.
After about five minutes of fiddling with the controls, I managed to unhook the cable and carry my bounty upstairs. The company knew that I was a journalist writing about the Homeport, but the customers I have spoken to had few complaints. Like most of the best ideas, it's dead simple.
Foks says she is quite proud of the Homeport that is bolted to the side of her house in Burntwood Grange Road. She uses a swipe card to release the cable and take in her goods. She doesn't own the box, and it is automatically taken away the next day after she has unpacked all her shopping.
Foks was hesitant about using the Homeport delivery service at first - until one occasion when she was stuck in Exeter and used it to order the ingredients for a dinner party. "A box full of chicken breasts, sun-dried tomatoes and bottles of Rioja were waiting for me when I drove back," she says. The dinner party was saved and she was convinced that the Homeport was worth keeping.
Homeport has been under development for three years. Initially the company built prototypes that involved complicated sets of padlocks and keys. But earlier this year it was introduced to card technology and its plan began to fall into place. An initial pilot scheme with fewer than 100 boxes has been running in London since September.
"There is quite a lot of inertia initially," says Mark Lunn of Homeport. "It takes quite a lot of time and effort to get people to have one fitted, and once fitted, it then takes quite some time to get them to actually order, but once you have used one, people seem to use it every week." Only a third of people in the pilot scheme choose to order on the internet. The rest prefer phone and fax. About 10% have used the system for dry cleaning.
"We want to have an open system that can be used by many, many retailers and delivery companies," says Lunn. The company has already signed up with Jeeves of Belgravia, Food Ferry and Berry Brothers. Homeport started its first major trial with Sainsbury's on January 2. The scheme will be piloted in 50 postcode areas across London and the Thames Valley. An installation charge of £30 will be waived for the pilot scheme.
Apart from this fee, the use of the Homeport is free, save for the delivery costs that are usually added to online shopping bills. The retailers pay Homeport £1 per delivery to use its boxes, and the hope is that the retailers will save money because they will be able to spread out deliveries through the day - or night - and, crucially, spend less time at each house. "They can double park, plug in and be gone in three minutes," says Lunn. Traditional deliveries take about 10 minutes while the driver parks, rings the doorbell and politely delivers the goods.
Homeport's main advantages are that it is flexible and cheap to install. But it is only the first generation of home-delivery boxes. Already, other more permanent boxes are being touted as potential rivals. Fellow start-ups Dynamid and BearBox are developing permanent cool boxes for the outside of houses. Both companies have tested 100 units each at homes around London in the run-up to Christmas and hope to launch fully by the spring.
Of course, consumer confidence has to be built before any kind of secure box finds its way into every street in the UK. One obvious problem is security; another is getting the supermarkets to sign up. Sainsbury's has already announced a partnership with Homeport, but Tesco.com, the UK's largest online food retailer, says it is yet to be convinced that either home-delivery box system - removable or permanent - is reliable enough. Tesco claims that its customers (who spend around £90 per shop) like to be around when their groceries arrive and, what's more, have built relationships with its delivery people.
Whether we are really so fond of the man in the white van is debatable, but don't write off the out-of-town retail centre yet: the next big net retail scheme in the pipeline is rumoured to include drive-though pick-up points. As for Foks, she took herself and her two children to the supermarket last week "just for a change".
Useful links
Homeporthome
Dynamid
Bearbox
