La Poste to start Sunday delivery
From next month Chronopost is to start delivering parcels on Sunday mornings in Paris and about a dozen regional towns as it moves to beat other delivery services.
It comes after pressure from Amazon and other e-commerce sites who want seven-day delivery and follows a year of tests with CDiscount deliveries in Paris and its Hauts-de-Seine suburb.
Starting from November 19 parcels will be delivered between 9.00 and 13.00 in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes, Nice, Reims, Rennes, Strasbourg, Toulon and Toulouse.
The group said that these 1,000 postcodes cover half the population and it intends to extend the service gradually throughout next year.
It said it was responding to customer demand in a heavily-competitive industry where delivery flexibility was a key request from both internet sites such as Amazon, CDiscount and others as well as from residential and business customers.
Research for Chronopost had shown that 92.6% of customers who ordered goods on a Friday would like to have the option of Saturday or Sunday delivery.
Chronopost already handles Sunday deliveries in the UK through its parent company DPD UK (a subsidiary of La Poste).
In France, it has set up specialist services offering timed deliveries with Chrono Precise (with a window of two hours from 8.00 to 22.00), Chrono Samedeay which delivers parcels in the evening of posting, from 19.00 to 22.00 and Predict 1h, which geolocalises the parcel and allows delivery wherever specified.
The CGT and Sud-PTT unions have protested over the 鈥渦nilateral鈥� move saying La Poste should give them the means to improve daily deliveries.
