Early internet savvy spurs rapid growth
Parcel2go.com began in 2002 when
Fil Adams-Mercer, a Bolton-based businessman who had built a firm delivering video
magazines, decided to buy the domain name.
He commissioned a customer-relationship
management computer system and placed adverts on Google and eBay. The result, claims
Parcel2Go.com, is that it is Britain’s biggest independent online parcel delivery
company, handling 816,000 parcels a year, mostly for the nation’s army of
eBayers and other home-based website businesses.
Parcel2Go, which employs 30 staff
in Bolton, takes all its bookings over the internet, fulfilling deliveries through
arrangement with larger parcel groups such as DHL, FedEx and Citylink. Mr Adams-Mercer,
55, expects turnover to rise from £6m to £8m in the current financial
year.
“The latest research shows
that British eBayers are sending 80,000 parcels a night,” he says, “and
we have 650,000 customers on our database. We don’t see any of these parcels,
except when they can’t be delivered and come back to us.”
Mr Adams-Mercer says his main
competition is Royal Mail Parcelforce, but his business almost doubled its turnover
from £250,000 to £480,000 a month during last October’s postal
strike and the numbers have been sustained since then.
He attributes Parcel2Go’s
success to the system capability it has built and the scale it has accumulated.
“We’ll get to £10m
turnover in 2009-10.” Research by e-retail specialists IMRG shows there is
much further to go, with its figure of 860 million parcels shipped to Britain’s
26m internet customers in 2007 giving Parcel2Go.com a market share of just 0.8pc.
Parcel2Go.com
April 2000 Parcel2Go begins trading
from a single landline in one of Fil Adams-Mercer’s video shops 2002 Company
becomes the UK’s first internet parcel delivery service 2003 Invests £7,000
in a bespoke customer data management software package
October 2004 Joins forces with major
courier DHL for an advertising campaign with the online retailer eBay generating
more than £2.5m in revenue for Parcel2Go.com
October 2007 Post Office strike prompts
a 115pc increase in traffic almost overnight. The effects of the strike that month
— the extra it added in turnover — have been sustained one year on