The same approach across retail, warehouse and workplace: we measure, model and prove the economics on one of your sites before any rollout.
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Compare solutionsEnterprise-grade security and the integrations to slot eLocker into the systems you already run.
Security & integrations“What is a smart locker?” is a plain-English primer on how automated collections and returns actually work.
Read the guideFive things decide whether a locker estate earns its keep: how the door opens, whether the units are wired, where they stand, whether they have to hold food, and who is meant to be opening them. Get one of those wrong and you find out at the first peak, long after the site survey said it was fine. Each decision below has the trade-off spelled out, plus the point where that option stops making sense.
The locker estates we get asked to look at were specified around a product. The units themselves work fine. They just don't suit the volume going through them, or the site they landed on, or the people who were supposed to use them. Three patterns come up over and over.
A bank scoped on average daily volume runs out of doors on the busiest weekend of the year. The overflow goes straight back to the desk the lockers were meant to clear.
Access sounds like a detail until the site turns out to have no WiFi to grant, or agency staff turn out never to get issued a card.
Wired banks end up in a back corridor because that is where the spur is. Footfall doesn't follow the cabling.
The five decisions below are the ones worth arguing about before anyone quotes you a unit price.
The credential decides who can use the lockers, what happens when somebody turns up without it, and how much of your access estate you have to touch. The four below are the ones worth weighing. Pick by what the people at the door already have on them, then read the trade-off underneath, because each one changes what the system can prove afterwards.
The card people already carry opens the door. There's nothing to install, and locker permission sits in the same place as the rest of somebody's access. On a warehouse or workplace estate this is normally where you land.
A personalised link sent by text or email for customers, or the eLocker app for staff. The screen the person is already holding becomes the interface, so there's no kiosk to buy, queue at or repair.
A code generated for a single collection, entered at the unit or paired with a scan. It suits people who were never in your system: a courier, a contractor, a driver on their third drop of the day.
The unit reads a code held up to it, either the label already on the item or a code on somebody's screen. It earns its place on the loading side, where a colleague is putting fifty parcels away and shouldn't be typing anything.
Mains power at the bank, so there's no battery to plan around. You need a spur where the lockers are going, which in practice means an electrician, a permit and a slot in somebody's shutdown window.
Battery locks with a three-year battery guarantee, so a bank can go where cabling isn't practical. Placement stops being an electrical question and becomes a footfall one.
eLocker units report through an on-site gateway on its own cellular connection. There's no IT network access to grant, which keeps IT out of the critical path.
Any compartment that has to charge what's inside it. A locker handing back a charged scanner needs mains power, so that half of the decision is already made for you.
Anywhere getting power to the right spot costs more than the spot is worth. A survey that starts from the cabling will put the bank somewhere nobody walks.
Outdoor buys you access without staffing the building. It also buys you weather, a power run across a car park, and a planning conversation nobody put in the budget.
Anywhere the bank can sit inside the trading or working envelope. Units cost less than an outdoor-rated equivalent, and the building is already handling security, lighting and temperature for you. Power is usually a short run off something that exists.
Collection outside opening hours. If the door is locked the locker is locked, and out-of-hours collection is usually the whole reason the project got funded.
Car parks, yards, depots and store frontages, where somebody should be able to collect at six in the morning or eleven at night. Units are rated for outdoor siting, so weather becomes a specification question rather than a risk you carry. A container-based bank turns a dead corner of a yard into a collection point without touching the building.
Low volume, or no realistic power route. An outdoor bank plus the groundwork has to earn its keep every week, and a handful of collections a day won't cover it. Ask what the site does in its quietest week rather than its busiest.
Right far more often than people expect. Where an order sits for minutes rather than hours, ambient compartments do the job. Rapid grocery handovers to couriers work this way, with an alert raised if the order hasn't been collected inside the window you set.
Anything that has to hold temperature past the collection window you can actually enforce. If an order might sit there for a whole shift, an ambient compartment gives you nothing to fall back on when it isn't collected.
Temperature-controlled compartments for grocery and food-to-go, where an order has to hold across a real shift instead of a few minutes.
Short dwell times. Chilled compartments cost more to buy and more to run, every hour, for the life of the bank. If the honest answer to how long an order will sit there is under half an hour, you're paying to cool an empty box most of the day.
Measure dwell time on the orders you already handle, then specify against that. It's the one input on this page you can get from your own data before you speak to anybody.
The cabinets look much the same. The workflow behind them is where they diverge, and choosing the wrong one is how an estate ends up unused.
Customers collect their own online orders from their own phone, so the handover stops depending on who is on shift. Wrong choice where the order needs a conversation at the point of handover, like a fitting, a demo or an identity check.
Explore click and collect lockers
Scanners, radios and handhelds issued against a named worker, with the return logged rather than assumed. Wrong choice for consumables nobody hands back, because with no return leg you've bought an expensive cupboard.
Explore warehouse asset lockers
Laptops, headsets and peripherals collected, returned and swapped without an IT desk in the middle of it. Wrong choice on a floor with a handful of users, where a staffed desk stays cheaper until the volume of swaps justifies a bank.
Explore workplace IT lockersWorth being blunt about one combination. A customer-facing bank is a poor place to run staff asset control, because customer access has to work for somebody you have never met, and asset control only works if every open carries a name. One estate can carry both. It's rarely the right first project.
Every option above sits on the same layer: software that sets up units, decides who can open what, and turns every open into a record. The audit trail comes from there. So do the overdue alerts, and the numbers you'll need when somebody asks whether the pilot worked.
How units, users, permissions, alerts and reporting are run from one platform.
Readers, credentials and permissions in detail, if the card side is where your decision sits.
If you're specifying with no locker estate in place, that's the part to interrogate hardest. A site survey will settle the hardware questions in an afternoon. The software ones show up two years in, when you want to compare one site against another and find that you can't.
The one your people already carry. On a staff estate that's the access card. For customers it's the phone, because you have no card relationship with them.
No. eLocker units report through an on-site gateway on its own cellular connection, so there's no IT network access to grant.
Wireless battery units carry a three-year battery guarantee.
Technically yes. It's rarely the right first project, because the two workflows want different things from access and reporting, and proving one is easier than proving both at once.
Only if the order has to hold for hours. For rapid handovers that sit for minutes, ambient compartments with a collection window and an alert are usually the right call.
Yes. Units are rated for indoor or outdoor siting, and container-based banks are built for yards, depots and outdoor sites.
Start with one site and one workflow. A single bank measured against your current process tells you more than a specification argument, and it's cheap to change your mind afterwards.
Send us the site, the volume and who is meant to be opening the doors. We'll tell you which type fits, and where we think it won't.
