E-commerce deliveries find a home

Mike Schell manages a high-end apartment building in downtown Tacoma, according to his title, but really he's more of a peeler.

"On a daily basis, I'm peeling FedEx, UPS, Airborne stickers off the door," said Schell, who runs the Cliff Street Lofts, a building managed by Lorig Management Services. "All those different drivers are trying to catch me in the building to leave a package or deliver something. It's a secure building so they're frustrated."

Busy professionals may now order everything from books to cold cream at their work desks, thanks to the birth of online shopping. But another dilemma has surfaced in the midst: where to ship this stuff. A Forrester Research report said the number of missed e-commerce deliveries to multifamily residential communities would double to 160 million in two years. For delivery services, that represents millions of dollars of lost manpower as workers make second and third attempts to deliver packages.

Eli Moreno, the founder of the Emerald Group, which manages two dozen apartment complexes in Tacoma, saw a need. And like all good entrepreneurs, he sought to fill it.

He and Greg Williams founded the Tacoma-based ShopperBox Networks: a privately funded company that installs delivery boxes at apartment buildings. "Having our leasing managers taking care of packages, it's terribly wasteful," Moreno said. "That's how the concept got started."

Inside the Cliff Street Lofts the company has set up what resembles an airport-locker box, with compartments of different sizes. Residents may receive letters and books in smaller compartments, or dry cleaning in larger ones.

The boxes are connected to the Internet. When a vendor drops off a package, the resident is notified via voice and electronic mail that the delivery is located in a specified box. Once the customer retrieves the goods using a numeric code, the password is deleted.

The company is also testing a set of climate-controlled boxes, where residents may have take-out dinners and groceries delivered. The first prototype is due Oct. 15.

ShopperBox plans to charge delivery companies such as Federal Express for access to the boxes. The idea is that they would pay a fee to get a package to a customer the first time around. "What we're doing here is rewriting the whole manual for delivery," Moreno said. "That's what we're in the process of doing."

Moreno said they plan to enter other Puget Sound-area markets by the end of the year. His goal is make such boxes ubiquitous so delivery services can run packages to customers 24 hours a day.

The company has hurdles to overcome. ShopperBox is testing its product in Tacoma, a market that doesn't have an online grocery-delivery service. To test the concept, the company built its own Web site, where residents may order goods and services to be sent to the boxes.

Moreno said the company has no intent of becoming an online retailer; once it enters larger markets, the shopping system it set up will go away.

At the Cliff Street Lofts, roughly a third of the 46 residents have signed up for the program--Schell included. ShopperBox hosted an open house over the weekend to introduce the new service.

In the meantime, the service is a novelty--one that the company hopes will catch on. "I'm going to try dry cleaning next week," Schell said. "I never get my dry cleaning in on time."

Inside Technology appears Tuesdays in The Seattle Times. Monica Soto's phone is 206-515-5632. Her e-mail address is msoto@seattletimes.com.