With more people carrying out safe shopping online than ever before, it is not only retailers that are having to invest a lot of cash to adapt to record levels of demand. It’s also the delivery firms that serve them.

Internet Retailing reports that DPD is set to spend £200 million to add new distribution centres across the UK, procure additional vans and hire thousands of people to bolster its existing team as a result of these unprecedented circumstances.

Although there was growing demand for online shopping prior to the emergence of COVID-19, the disruption caused by the pandemic has helped to make e-commerce orders far more popular, and so many companies are having to take drastic action to cope.

Indeed, as DPD looks ahead to the festive season this year, expectations are that the Black Friday weekend in particular will be the busiest for online orders that the UK has ever seen - hence the need to start spending now to ensure that the company is adequately prepared for this easy-to-predict spike in activity.

Spokesperson Dwain McDonald said that this historic rise in safe shopping online has proved to be the ideal impetus for further investment, especially since there are no signs that demand will slow significantly in the next few months.

McDonald also argued that the impact of the pandemic on consumer shopping habits will be permanent, at least in the sense that many millions more people will buy from e-commerce sites on a more regular basis.

He went on to claim that the high street will recover from the serious hit that it has taken in the past few months, but that this will not change the fact that more consumers now rely on the web for the majority of their retail needs.