Dutch Carriers Are Sharing Parcel Points: What the New Delivery Covenant Means for E-Commerce

For as long as parcel delivery has existed in the Netherlands, PostNL, DHL, DPD and newer players such as Budbee and De Buren have competed the same way most logistics networks compete: by building their own pickup infrastructure and keeping it to themselves. That is now changing. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht have brought the country's largest carriers, including PostNL, DHL, DPD, Budbee, VintedGo, Amazon and locker operator De Buren, into a shared agreement to build one open network of parcel points instead of six separate ones. On paper it looks like a modest urban planning decision. In practice it is one of the clearest signals yet that European last mile delivery infrastructure is heading toward becoming a shared utility, and it has direct consequences for every e-commerce business that ships in or through the Netherlands.

What the Covenant Actually Says

The four largest Dutch municipalities have signed an agreement with the country's major carriers and parcel point operators to build a shared, open network of pickup locations. Rather than each carrier maintaining its own separate wall of lockers on the same street, participating carriers commit to using shared locations that any connected carrier can serve. The ambition is concrete: no resident in these cities should have to travel more than 300 to 500 meters to reach a pickup point, with the network built out by 2028. Locker operator De Buren alone has announced plans for roughly 3,000 parcel point locations nationwide as its contribution to that goal.

The reason cities pushed for this is straightforward. In the four largest municipalities combined, carriers deliver more than 200,000 parcels a day, and roughly 80 percent of those still go straight to a home address. That volume of delivery vans circulating through residential streets creates congestion, parking pressure and safety issues that city planners have been trying to solve for years. The covenant was made possible through the DMI-ecosystem, a public-private cooperation between national government, provinces, municipalities and industry, and it was signed by PostNL, DHL, DPD, Budbee, VintedGo, De Buren and ViaTim, with Amazon involved in the wider initiative. Amsterdam's own announcement of the agreement frames it plainly: more shared pickup points, fewer vans on residential streets.

Why Competing Carriers Are Suddenly Cooperating

Pickup point density has traditionally been a competitive weapon in last mile delivery. The carrier with more lockers within walking distance of a customer wins more checkout selections. That is precisely why this agreement is unusual. Six competing networks are choosing to share physical infrastructure rather than fight over it.

The economics explain the shift. Building five separate locker walls within the same city block is expensive, slow and increasingly difficult to permit, especially as municipalities grow less tolerant of cluttered streetscapes. At the same time, none of that duplicated infrastructure did anything to reduce the number of delivery vans circulating through a neighborhood, which is the actual problem cities are trying to solve. Sharing the physical layer lets carriers keep competing on price, speed and service quality, the things that actually differentiate them, while treating the pickup point itself as shared plumbing.

We think this is worth paying close attention to, because it rarely happens in logistics. Physical infrastructure sharing agreements between direct competitors are far more common in telecoms, where operators share cell towers, than in parcel delivery. When it does happen, it is usually a sign that a layer of the value chain has stopped being a source of competitive advantage and started being a cost center everyone would rather shrink together.

The Netherlands Is Catching Up, Not Leading

It is worth putting this in a European context, because the Netherlands is not inventing the shared pickup point model. France has run something close to this for two decades through its dense network of relay points, where a single shop counter routinely accepts parcels on behalf of several different carriers rather than one. The United Kingdom built similar shared-network thinking into its store-based pickup services years ago. What those markets show is that shared, carrier-agnostic pickup infrastructure is not a temporary compromise. It is a stable, mature model that customers actually prefer, because it means the nearest pickup point is simply the nearest pickup point, not the nearest point that happens to belong to the carrier a specific webshop chose.

Given that precedent, we expect the Dutch network to grow faster than the 2028 target suggests once the first shared locations prove themselves, and we expect other European cities facing the same delivery van congestion to follow with similar covenants. The European Union's push for Sustainable Urban Logistics Plans as part of its wider mobility strategy gives municipalities a policy framework to justify exactly this kind of agreement, which means the Netherlands is likely to be an early domino rather than an isolated case.

What This Means for E-Commerce Businesses and Shippers

A denser, shared pickup network is good news at checkout. Offering a nearby, carrier-agnostic pickup option tends to reduce delivery cost and improve the odds that a customer's preferred option is actually available, and checkout research consistently shows that a missing or inconvenient delivery option is one of the most common reasons a shopper abandons an order before paying. In principle, a shared network should make that problem smaller for everyone shipping into these cities.

In practice, the operational picture is messier than the headline. A shared network does not mean a single system. It means the same physical location is now technically served by several different carrier contracts, several different capacity limits and, in some cases, several different sets of opening hours and drop off rules. A pickup point that is open and available through PostNL's systems on a given afternoon may show as full through DPD's, simply because each carrier's booking system tracks its own allocation of lockers at that location rather than the location's true combined capacity.

For a merchant, that fragmentation is invisible until something breaks. A customer selects a pickup point at checkout because one carrier's plugin showed it as available, the shipment routes to a different carrier that has no visibility into that specific locker's status, and the parcel either bounces to a fallback address or sits in a support queue while two logistics teams work out whose responsibility it was.

The Hidden Complexity Behind "More Delivery Points"

This is the part of the story that gets skipped when a covenant like this is announced. Shared infrastructure does not remove complexity from a shipper's operation, it relocates it. Instead of managing one carrier's pickup point data, a merchant now needs live, accurate visibility into a location that multiple carriers can claim, with capacity and rules that can change carrier by carrier and week by week as the network expands toward its 2028 footprint.

Returns compound the problem. When a customer drops a return at a shared point, the point operator, not necessarily the original carrier, is the one physically holding the parcel. Without clear data on which carrier is contracted to collect from which location on which schedule, returns can sit far longer than they should, tying up refunds and inventory at exactly the moment a customer's patience is thinnest.

How a Logistics OS Turns Shared Infrastructure Into an Advantage

This is precisely the gap Zineps was built to close. We built Zineps as the Operating System for Shipments because we kept seeing the same pattern across e-commerce businesses and logistics partners: every new carrier, every new pickup network, every new locker operator meant another one-off integration, another dashboard, another support process to maintain. A shared parcel point covenant like this one is a perfect example of why that approach breaks down. The value of the network is only real for a merchant if their systems can see the full, combined picture across every connected carrier, not just the slice that one carrier's own plugin exposes.

Through Zineps, a merchant connects once and gets live rates, live coverage and live capacity across every carrier and pickup network in the platform, so the delivery options shown at checkout reflect the true, combined state of the shared network rather than a single carrier's partial view of it. Labels, tracking and returns are handled through the same orchestration layer, so a return dropped at a De Buren location and a return dropped at a PostNL point flow through one process instead of two. As new carriers or point operators join the covenant between now and 2028, that expansion is absorbed by the platform rather than triggering another round of manual integration work for the merchant's team.

What E-Commerce Brands Should Do Now

• Audit which of your current shipments already touch Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague or Utrecht, and check how many separate carrier apps or portals your team currently has to open just to confirm a pickup point's real time status.
• Ask every carrier you work with directly whether their pickup point and locker data is available through an open API feed, rather than only inside their own branded checkout widget or dashboard.
• Choose a shipping and orchestration layer that can ingest and normalize pickup point data from multiple carriers and locker operators at once, rather than one carrier at a time.
• Rebuild your returns policy around shared points before the network scales further, so customer service is working from a clear process instead of improvising case by case.
• Treat 2028 as a floor rather than a ceiling. Shared infrastructure programs that clear their first hurdles tend to expand faster than their original timelines, and the merchants who integrate early capture the checkout conversion benefit first.

The Bigger Pattern: Owning Infrastructure Matters Less Than Owning Orchestration

The real story behind this covenant is not that Dutch cities want fewer delivery vans, although they clearly do. It is that physical last mile infrastructure is starting to behave like a shared utility rather than a private competitive asset, and we expect more of Europe to follow the same path over the next several years. When the physical layer becomes shared, the competitive advantage moves up a level, to whoever can see across the entire shared network and act on it fastest. That is the layer Zineps operates on, and it is why we built the platform to treat every carrier and every pickup network as components to orchestrate rather than separate relationships to manage one by one.

If your business ships into the Netherlands, or into any European city likely to follow this model, now is the moment to make sure your logistics stack can see the whole shared network, not just the piece any single carrier is willing to show you. That is what Zineps is built for, and we would welcome the chance to show you how it works with your current carrier mix.