Zada said one of the biggest problems the local industry faces currently is around the sudden increase in delivery volumes to residential areas. “How many people shopping online are still working from home, or won’t return fully to the office?,” Hango-Zada said.  “It’s putting a real strain on our carrier networks because they weren’t built to deliver absolutely everywhere – they were built to deliver to nice, dense [urban] pockets.” The cost of freight is too cheap Aramax New Zealand’s chief executive Mark Little agreed, noting that free, or even cheap, delivery only makes sense when deliveries can be bundled together.  But with the rise of endless aisle shopping, and retailers increasingly fulfilling online orders from stores around the country, a single order might involve sending three or four different packages from different parts of the country. “If you want fast, there’s a cost there. And the cost of freight in Australia and in New Zealand is way too cheap,” Little said.  “What I mean by that is that it’s too cheap to be doing four different deliveries to one house in one day because the deliveries are coming from different stores in a retailer’s network.” One way Aramax has worked to solve this problem in New Zealand is by limiting deliveries to certain suburbs to certain days. This allows Aramax to consolidate deliveries into fewer vans, saving money on transportation, and providing certainty around when customers’ packages will arrive. However, with more retailers pushing next-day and same-day delivery, the network is under pressure.  “Retailers tend to want to be able to say things like ‘if you order today we can send it today’,” Little said. “But is that actually the expectation of the receiver?” Costs are on the rise According to Hango-Zada, one of the main reasons customers are paying for express shipping is not because it is fast, but because it is guaranteed to arrive on a particular day. “We’ve got this weird dichotomy where we don’t expect the customer to pay for shipping, but we still expect delivery to be amazing,” Hango-Zada said. “From a retailer’s perspective the cost of goods and wages have gone up, rent is up there, inflation is taking off, but… our costs have gone up as well. We’ve really got to consider that shipping costs are unrealistic. “If you’re delivering big and bulky items right now you’ll be feeling this at the moment. The cost of a bulky delivery has accelerated because of the sheer volume of deliveries in the network right now.” In an environment where some large and bulk purchases are taking months to arrive, a reliable shipping date is reassuring to customers.  Hango-Zada said solving the problem will come down to working out the most efficient way of delivering products to consumers without using up excessive amounts of delivery operators’ time.