It's little wonder that more and more of us are shopping online and from mail order catalogues. We live busy lives, and it's so much easier than having to fight your way to the shops. Better still, it can save you a fortune - whatever you're after, it's likely there will be someone offering a great discount online.

The problem comes when what you order is too big to fit through your letter box, or needs to be signed for on delivery. Most carriers will only deliver Monday to Friday, during the working day - just when you're going to be out at work!

It's a problem that Hugo Rose, director of Colchester-based Safe-Keepers Ltd, became very familiar with in his years with leading wine merchant, Lay & Wheeler. "It's staggering, but about 40 per cent of parcels sent to private addresses can't be delivered first time," he said. "They get taken back to the carrier's depot and, if the customer doesn't arrange to collect them or take delivery within a few days, they get returned to the vendor. It's frustrating for customers and adds a lot to the vendor's costs."

Safe-Keepers developed MyParcel to solve the problem, making like easier for everyone involved. Instead of having purchases sent to their home address, customers can choose to have them delivered to a nearby secure storage facility operated by Safestore, the UK's largest self-storage provider. Its facilities are open seven days a week at times convenient to both carriers and customers. "While the concept is simple, the challenge was to make it easy to operate and use," said Hugo. "It was clear our entire operation had to be based on a web site - one that was accessible to customers, the concierges at Safestore's depots, and the MyParcel team - and we needed to find a web site developer that could quickly pull together everything we needed. Our business plan gave us two months to put the web site in place and a clear budget for the work - one we couldn't afford to exceed."

Safe-Keepers chose A Recipe For Success to complete the project. They were impressed by our clear understanding - not just of the functionality they required, but of the importance of delivering on time and to budget.

Richard Seagers managed the project for A Recipe for Success. "If we had had to develop all the functionality from scratch, we would never have met the deadline," he said. "That's where our e-KIS toolkit gave us a big advantage. Most of the functionality we needed was already available, so we were able to build what Safe-Keepers needed really quickly. It was a challenge to meet the mid-September deadline we were set, but we did it!"

That meant testing and training could start on schedule, boosting everyone's confidence that MyParcel could be launched in November as planned - in good time for customers to start using the service to receive their Christmas purchases.
"I've been delighted with the support I've received from A Recipe For Success," said Hugo. "They delivered exactly what was promised - on time and to budget. It boosted our confidence in our plans and meant we could launch on schedule."

MyParcel was launched on November 14th. Currently, customers can choose to have their purchases delivered to one of five Safestore depots in inner London. Further depots will come on stream in 2006. To learn more about the service, visit MyParcel website.