Redelivery is a design problem, not a manners problem
Japan's parcel industry has spent years asking recipients to feel considerate about missed deliveries. Second attempts fall when choosing is easier than not choosing, and when the shop, not the driver, offers the choice.
Every few months someone in the Japanese parcel industry, and sometimes someone in government, appeals to the public to be at home when a parcel arrives. The posters show a tired driver on a staircase. The message is that a missed delivery is a small discourtesy repeated millions of times, and that a thoughtful recipient would arrange to be in. I understand why the message is used. The work it describes is real, and since April 2024, when the annual cap on drivers' overtime took effect, every hour a driver spends climbing to an empty flat is an hour the network cannot easily replace.
I no longer believe the appeal works, and I think it points attention at the wrong person. The recipient of an online order usually did not choose the carrier, the delivery day or the time window. A shop chose those things, often by default, at a moment when the customer was thinking about the product and its price. If the parcel then arrives while she is at work, the failure belongs to a design she never saw. Asking her to be more considerate is asking her to repair someone else's checkout page.
Posters do not move parcels
When I joined Kazemachi in 2021, 13.6 per cent of our parcels needed a second attempt. We had run courtesy campaigns before, and the rate had barely moved. I asked our research team to look at what had changed behaviour rather than what customers said about it. The answer was consistent across five years of data. Messages describing the driver's burden produced sympathy in surveys and almost nothing on the doorstep. What reduced missed deliveries was a choice offered at the right moment, one the customer could make in under ten seconds.
The right moment turned out to be the evening before dispatch, not the morning of delivery. A notice that arrives the night before, with three options and the doorstep pre-selected, gives a working person time to think about tomorrow. A notice that arrives as the van leaves the depot mostly produces anxiety. We tested the two across 140 depots for six months. The evening-before notice reduced second attempts by about four times as much, for the same cost per message.
The options matter as much as the timing. A locker on the way home is a choice; a locker twenty minutes out of the way is a penalty with a friendly name. We put most of our 5,600 lockers at railway stations, supermarkets and municipal offices, where people already go, and we measure each site's use monthly. Unattended placement at the door, which many customers prefer, needs its own design: a clear photograph on delivery, a simple claims process and an honest statement of what we will cover if a parcel goes missing. Those claims cost us about ¥310 million a year, far less than the driver hours that second attempts would consume.
None of this is a moral argument. It is the ordinary craft of making one behaviour easier than another. A parcel carrier is unusually well placed to practise it, because we know the address, the size of the parcel and often the customer's history before the van is loaded. For years we used that knowledge for routing and not for marketing.
Put the choice where the order is placed
The larger opportunity lies upstream. Most second attempts are decided at the online checkout, when a customer accepts the default delivery option without reading it. If the default is the doorstep with no window, a share of parcels will fail before they are packed. If the default offers a pickup point near the customer's station, with the doorstep one tap away, the arithmetic changes before anyone has to remember anything.
Carriers cannot redesign a retailer's checkout, and we should not pretend otherwise. What we can do is make the better default cheaper for the retailer. Since 2022 we have paid online shippers a small credit for each parcel whose recipient chose a pickup point at checkout, and we give them our locker map and availability data so the option can be shown properly. Six of our twenty largest shippers now show a pickup point first. In their parcels, second attempts run below 5 per cent. Among shippers whose checkout still defaults to the doorstep with no window, the rate is above 10 per cent.
The debate in Japan about labelling delivery as free belongs here too. A label that says delivery costs nothing tells the customer that every delivery option is equal. They are not equal in driver hours, and many customers would choose differently if the difference were visible to them. I do not think retailers should be obliged to show a carrier's costs at checkout. I do think a retailer that offers a cheaper pickup option should be able to pass the saving on in plain words, and that carriers should write contracts that make that possible.
What a carrier should refuse to do
Two tempting responses deserve to be refused. The first is a fee charged to the recipient for a second attempt. We modelled one in 2021, at ¥110 a parcel, and it would have raised several billion yen a year. It would also have charged people for a design they did not choose, at the door, through a driver who would have had to collect it and absorb the anger. The incentive would have landed on the person least able to change the outcome. We declined it, and I would decline it again.
The second is to make unattended placement the default without asking. It is the quickest way to bring a second-attempt rate down, and some in our industry have argued for it. But a parcel left outside a door is a decision about a customer's property, privacy and sometimes safety, and in apartment buildings it is also a decision about neighbours. We offer unattended placement as a standing instruction that a customer chooses once and can withdraw at any time. About 19 per cent of our parcels are now delivered that way, and the customers who chose it complain far less than those who would have had it chosen for them.
The test I now apply to any proposal for reducing redelivery has three parts. Does it change what happens before the van leaves, or does it ask someone to feel bad afterwards? Does it put the choice where the decision is actually made, which is usually a checkout, or where it is convenient for us to ask? And does the cost of a missed delivery fall on the party who could have prevented it? Our second-attempt rate was 7.9 per cent in the year to March 2026. It fell because we stopped asking customers to be better people and started making the better choice the easier one.