September 1, 2026
When MPs take time out of their schedule to talk about a logistics provider, you know someone messed up. But that’s what happened last December: several UK MPs called out Evri for abandoning parcels, missing deliveries, and having “systematic problems” as a company.
Here’s the punch line though: Evri posted record delivery volume and EBITDA last year. Plenty of businesses still use its service, and even more will in the future now its merger with DHL is complete.
The lesson for D2C founders?
Logistics is not a public relations play. A lot of companies with what we could delicately describe as “vested interests” argue that consumers care deeply about your supply chain or courier choice; they sometimes even frame it as an essential part of your marketing strategy.
Yet if you asked the average person which company delivered their last five parcels, they will most likely look at you with a look that says “what are you doing in my kitchen?”
What they will be able to tell you is whether they paid for the delivery, how fast it arrived, and how easy the process was. Nobody boycotts a brand over its courier. But they do select brands based on exactly the things that couriers facilitate.
So the point is not to choose the “right” logistics provider; it’s to diversify the range of partners you can access to optimise delivery time and costs at a frankly boringly granular level.
Courier diversification is the industry term for building strategic partnerships with multiple courier networks.
It became a hot topic during the pandemic because supply chains were a mess and businesses at basically every level suddenly realised negotiating exclusive deals for better costs also put them in an awkward position when their chosen provider suddenly, say, ran out of drivers.
But diversification of all kinds has remained top-of-mind for most logistics professionals ever since.
The core idea is simple: if you have a wider network of potential fulfilment partners, you can select which to use based on a range of factors, including cost, location, availability, and service quality.
That protects you against things like demand peaks, where individual couriers often have limited available pick-ups, and unexpected new surcharges that could wipe out your margins. It also means you can part ways with couriers that consistently lose or damage your products; you’re never too heavily invested in a partner to let poor performance slide.
Once you start thinking about couriers as options, rather than fixed partners, working with Evri goes from a serious CX risk to a strategic choice. Most of the issues with the UK’s favourite logistics brand can be solved by selecting how, when, and where you use them.
For example, Evri’s service is often postcode dependent, partially because its couriers are self-employed and paid per-parcel. Delivering the same set of parcels to a nice row of suburban houses pays the same as delivering to hard-to-serve areas filled with potholes and bogs.
It’s hard to imagine those incentives not causing problems.
That doesn’t mean errors don’t happen in areas that are easier to navigate, of course. The company also struggles during demand spikes, having built its capacity around standard fulfilment rates.
But when you combine these two factors, there’s a very reasonable case that many of the company’s “systematic problems” are reduced. Because if you can select the service only for areas where its couriers can easily deliver—and avoid using them excessively during peak periods—you are far less likely to see parcels being thrown over walls or dumped in nearby bins.
The market is consolidating fast. Not only have DHL and Evri merged, but InPost has also acquired Yodel. For most founders, that probably feels a bit like hearing about the dating history of your nephew’s Fortnite squad. But it has real implications for your business.
Consolidation gives a smaller group of companies more influence over prices. With fewer couriers competing for your business, there is less pressure to undercut rivals. So as the UK’s courier networks merge, founders face the prospect of slowly inflating fulfilment costs.
Diversification helps you keep that cost creep at bay. But it also has the potential to help you win more sales.
Making Evri a viable option might be useful, but it’s hardly exciting to D2C founders. What is exciting is extending your next-day delivery window late enough that more mid-evening doomscrolling turns into conversions.
This is where your logistics model and the category “things customers give even a little bit of a shit about” collide. Because strong courier diversification is crucial to offering the kind of delivery speed and quality consumers increasingly cite as a major draw. In fact, 20% of consumers say that faster delivery would encourage them to complete their purchase.
The right combination of 3PL operational agility and a diversified courier network lets you extend next-day delivery way past most companies. If you receive an order at 8:59pm and are able to pick, pack, and secure a local courier who can add it to their rounds, the cut-off for next-day orders shifts several hours ahead of most competitors.
That might well have a very marginal impact on consumer behaviour; if someone was going to make a purchase, would they really be swayed by slightly faster delivery? And the answer is no, in most cases they probably wouldn’t.
But let’s think about how many different clusters of consumers might be influenced by highly visible, and heavily extended, next-day delivery options:
People who actively need their product the next day
Fairweather fans who lose enthusiasm for the product when faced with the prospect of waiting thirty-six hours
Dopamine fiends who were just browsing but suddenly see that they could have the product so fast
Even if each of these groups constitutes a small fraction of your total customer base, extending your next-day deliveries is going to increase conversions. Nobody is saying this will double your daily order rate or be the deciding factor in your company’s fate.
But it could be the kind of incremental win that successful founders know compounds over time.
Want to explore how Zendbox's MagicShip uses a wide range of courier options to enable next-day deliveries for orders up to 9pm?
Courier diversification means building working relationships with multiple courier networks. Rather than one exclusive contract, you hold a range of options and choose between them order by order, based on cost, destination, speed and availability.
For most brands past the “do it yourself” phase, working with multiple couriers is a major advantage. While having a single courier gives you a single pricing structure and service level, it also leaves you vulnerable to service problems and price spikes.
Multiple couriers let you route each parcel to whichever network offers the best price, service, or coverage. You can mix-and-match, enabling more flexibility during peak seasons and unexpected demand spikes. And it gives you more negotiating leverage, because a courier that can be swapped out has a reason to keep performance up.
Mostly administrative rather than strategic. Each network brings its own contract, integration, label format, tracking feed and claims process, so what looks like a simple routing decision turns into several systems to reconcile. Splitting volume across networks can also weaken the rate you'd get from concentrating it with one, and some carriers set minimum volume commitments that make small allocations uneconomic.
Managing this in-house is a genuine operational cost, which is why most brands access diversification through a 3PL that already holds the contracts and the integrations.
Three practical ones:
It protects margins as the UK courier market consolidates; a series of recent mergers have reduced the level of competition and could potentially lead to price inflation
It insulates you from peak-period capacity limits and surprise surcharges, because you're not dependent on one provider's availability in November
And it extends what you can promise at checkout: pairing a diversified network with an agile 3PL can push next-day cut-offs hours later than competitors, which matters given that 20% of consumers say faster delivery would encourage them to complete a purchase.
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