Juan Sotolongo from 722 Consulting joins me to analyse trends and strategies in Chinese e-commerce delivery:

• Why Amazon is pulling out of China
• Cultural and business considerations in selling in China
• JD.com exiting the Australian market
• Comparing Alibaba and JD's delivery networks
• JD.com slashing delivery costs and the impact on share price
• How Alibaba is managing delivery costs
• Alibaba's stakes in courier companies
• Out-of-home delivery, including parcel lockers
• Volumes and third-party operated parcel lockers
• Profitability and efficiency with parcel lockers
• Luxury delivery service
• Customer service for e-commerce consumers
• Could some of these initiatives work in the West?
• Customer experience and the last mile

Dean Maciuba, Director of Consulting Services at Logistics Trends & Insights, analyses FedEx Express's decision to dump Amazon:

• The factors behind FedEx's decision
• Bad blood between FedEx and Amazon
• What does one-day Prime have to do it?
• Peak season volumes
• Is Amazon a true competitor in the last mile?
• FedEx Ground and Amazon going forward
• FedEx capacity concerns and network renewal

Then we get on to the topic of Amazon's Delivery Service Partners (DSPs):

• Incentives available to prospective DSPs
• Amazon moving into mid-sized markets - concerns about density
• Is Amazon finding it difficult sourcing DSPs?
• Structure of DSPs (including size of fleets), and how it compares to the FedEx Ground model
• Profitability for DSPs
• Training and driver efficiency
• Amazon and B2B e-commerce (including healthcare and technology)
• DSP vehicles
• How DSPs will impact on US Postal Service volumes
• The fate of Amazon's original DSPs

Patrick Leysen, VP Future Lab at bpost, talks about bpost's approach to innovation, including its recent in-home delivery trial with Zalando:

• The importance of trust in enabling in-home delivery
• How new sharing platforms enable trust between strangers
• Impact on transparency and a two-way relationship on repeat business
• Creating the Parcify delivery start-up
• How bpost acquired Parcify
• Crowd-sourced delivery
• Markets for same-day delivery
• Creating and nurturing innovation in a big organisation
• Co-creation - how bpost worked with Zalando to create the in-home parcel delivery pilot programme
• Creating new in-home services

Professor John Manners-Bell, Chief Executive at Ti Insights, joins me to analyse the causes and potential cures for the global driver shortage:

• What's behind the driver shortage
• Ensuring quality of drivers
• The importance of driver welfare
• Money! Driver remuneration
• Supply and demand being driven by e-commerce
• Women participation in trucking
• Government's role
• Emissions standards
• Autonomous trucks, including regulation
• Structural inefficiencies in the road freight market

Marek Różycki, Managing Partner at Last Mile Experts, joins me to preview our presentation at Leaders In Logistics Last Mile Delivery:

• Why is Amazon interested in the last mile?
• Is Amazon a predictable animal?

Wayne Haubner, CTO at the Escher Group, talks about advances in technology in the post office world:

• Keeping POS technology simple while offering a greater range of over-the-counter transactions
• The user experience and what that means for training costs and error rates
• Integration between retail systems and other internal systems
• Communicating between different POS platforms - including mobile POS - in real time
• Advantages of in-store mobile POS
• Pop-up retail stores (including parcel collection)
• Cashierless stores, such as Amazon Go - could they work in the postal world?
• Customer loyalty programmes and the in-store customer experience
• How technology can help in finding new revenue streams
• Automation and self-service in post offices
• Real time data enabling customised delivery (interactive delivery management)
• Integrity of data in cross-border shipping (including blockchain)

Amazon Prime will soon promise next-day delivery for its members in the USA. Marek Rozycki, Managing Partner at Last Mile Experts, joins me to analyse this move:

• Amazon: the catalyst for change in the last mile
• The scale of Amazon's investment in the last mile
• Proximity to the customer and density of fulfilment centres
• Shipping by air to please the customer
• Walmart's response - motivated by competition or by delighting the customer?
• Parcel volume for Amazon's Delivery Service Partners - and what motivates Amazon to find alternative delivery providers
• Customer expectations in the last mile - including out-of-home delivery options

Also in this episode:

• Shipster, Australia Post's answer to Amazon Prime, is set to close in July
• Poste Italiane has announced a joint venture with digital freight start-up sennder

John Callan, co-founder and Managing Director at Ursa Major Associates, and co-founder of the PostalVision2020 initiative, joins me to talk about the Trump-quake in the US postal sector, including:

• How President Trump has injected excitement into the postal sector
• Is the USPS's plight all Amazon's fault?
• The Postal Taskforce
• The political interest in the US Postal Service… and Jeff Bezos's political views
• Privatisation
• STOP Act and its global implications
• The USA's potential exit from the UPU
• USPS Board of Governors
• Universal Service Obligation - potential for change and opportunities

Click here to find out more about this year's PostalVision2020 event.

Marshall Hughes, co-founder and CEO of delivery start-up Passel, joins me. We cover:

• The technology and reasoning behind Passel
• Accessing excess capacity compared to professional or "gig economy" couriers
• What cocooning is and what it means for a startup - and how it's different to pivoting
• E-commerce returns and exchanges
• The experience for passers (Passel's delivery people) and why it's important - and how it differs from the gig economy delivery experience
• Passel's partnership with Swinburne University about smart cities
• Demand for same-day and next-day delivery
  • Which sectors?
  • What kind of customers?

Pierre Morin, International Relations at Canada Post, is back to fill us in on what has been happening at the UPU:

• Net importers vs net exporters
• A detailed discussion of the three options that have been proposed:
  • Accelerating minor increases previously agreed (including modelling of how this would affect Canada Post)
  • Self-declared rates (the only option that currently seems acceptable to the USA), including protections against price gouging
  • The compromise option with a transition period before introducing self-declared rates, including price caps
• The postal ballot process, including the involvement of "sanctioned countries"
• Likely process for the Congress to be held in September - if indeed it goes ahead
• The chance for compromise at the Congress
• Public statements made by other nations
• Funding changes if the USA withdraws from the UPU

First up this week, a quick update on the status of the UPU's terminal dues discussions. Check out episode 146 for a full discussion on this topic from Canada Post's Pierre Morin. It's a topic that I'll revisit in full in a future episode.

Then Dean Maciuba from Logistics Trends & Insights joins me to talk about a new development in e-commerce returns:

• Walgreens and Nordstrom (a department store, not just a clothing store as I say in the podcast!) to offer pick-ups and returns on behalf of other retailers
• A retailer-agnostic returns channel for retailers
• The driver for Walgreens to take returns
• Implications for the postal sector - in particular those posts offering e-commerce returns solutions
• FedEx's deal with Walgreens to be a retail location for FedEx - and its implementation at the coalface
• The day-to-day practicalities of dealing with parcels in a retail outlet, including secure storage
• Is this another opportunity missed by the US Postal Service?