An upcoming move to replace paper with email receipts by Evri has infuriated convenience retailers over the additional staff labour and time it will consume.
Following a trial, Evri will soon be rolling out digital receipts in a bid to “improve the customer experience, reduce the number of paper receipt cards, and drive us towards our net-zero target”, the courier company said.
It is understood Evri believes the time taken to enter an email address is approximately the same as writing out the number of parcels and date on the current paper receipt.
Convenience retailers, however, have disagreed, stressing the impact it will have on labour productivity and costs.
“My sites receive between 100 and 500 parcels per day and we believe this could add 30 seconds to one minute to each customer, which will hugely clog up our till points and require extra labour,” said independent retailer Alex Kapadia, who owns five stores across Northampton, Surrey and Bedfordshire.
“Evri are saying that it will take the same time as the current process, but we have timed both and it is three to four times longer, and we never get a situation where the customer walks off and doesn’t want the receipt. When they are handing over something of value, they want proof of this.”
Premier retailer Suril Patel said: “It’s a long process already compared to Yodel, and now they’re putting that extra step in which is going to take more of my staff’s time and cause longer queues. There’s also going to be backlash from customers because of the privacy around giving their personal email addresses out. I’m wondering if offering the service is worth it at all now.”
“It’s going to cause chaos,” said One Stop franchisee Nathalie Fullerton. “Our store is small but very busy, especially with older people. We’re not getting paid anywhere near enough to be gathering their data, it’s not viable for us to have another member of staff on shift to deal with this.”
Nisa retailer Sukh Gill added: “I can foresee instances where details get misheard or the staff member cannot understand the email address correctly or inadvertently makes an error, which will then cause customers to come back into stores because they have not received their email receipt.”
Evri said it was planning to implement a solution to auto-fill the customer email address “where possible”. This means if the platform the customer is using captures their email address and it is passed on to Evri, it will auto-fill. This includes any returns to retailers created via Evri.com or app and customer to customer (C2C) parcels.
However, it is unclear how email address data will be passed on to Evri when consumers issue returns via an online retailer, or send parcels on platforms such as Vinted, and the sector has called for clarity.
“Evri is saying they will be able to pre-populate the email field on some customers where they already have the email address, but have refused to clarify how often this will be possible,” added Kapadia. “We have specifically asked whether this will be the case on the majority of the parcels that we receive from third parties like Amazon and Vinted and they did not answer the question.”
Bassett Retail operations manager Dave Hiscutt said: “With dwindling commissions and the constant increase in cost for us to do business, even at the very basic levels, service partners such as Evri need to be investing in ways to streamline transactions to make them more efficient from both the retailer and customer perspective.”
Londis retailer Atul Sodha added: “It’s just more work being passed on to us from a corporation that clearly doesn’t give a damn about the very people who complete their network.”
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