The Maze: Royal Mail dominates the delivery options shown by UK online shops. That lead changes when the retailer gets bigger or the competing carrier changes. Tembi, an ecommerce market-intelligence provider, puts Royal Mail at 63.8% of observed webshops, versus 24.8% for DPD UK. Among large shops, DPD UK leads instead. Royal Mail also usually appears before DPD UK when both are offered, but after Evri. The useful question is not simply who has the widest footprint. It is which merchants a carrier reaches, and where it sits when shoppers see alternatives.
The national lead hides a large-retailer gap. Among 4,402 UK shops with a Tembi size score of 75 or more, DPD UK appears at 44.9%, ahead of Royal Mail at 36.5%. Across all observed shops, Royal Mail leads by 39 percentage points; in the large-shop group, it trails DPD UK by 8.4 points. That is a reversal between retailer groups, not evidence of customers switching over time. Evri is much flatter: 6.4% across all shops and 5.9% among large ones. A count of merchant relationships can therefore flatter a carrier whose presence is concentrated away from larger accounts. The results suggest different customer mixes, but do not identify why retailers chose each service.
Presence and position are separate competitions. When Royal Mail and DPD UK share a checkout, Royal Mail is listed first in 90.7% of those cases. Against DHL, the figure is 89.9%. DPD UK can lead Royal Mail in large-shop availability while sitting below it in their shared checkouts. There is no contradiction: these measures ask different questions of different groups. One measures how often a retailer offers a carrier; the other measures which name comes first when two carriers appear together. Commercial teams should track both. Winning a merchant account does not automatically win its most prominent place in the delivery menu, and neither measure reveals the number of parcels that account actually sends.
Evri and InPost expose a different ordering pattern. Royal Mail appears first in only 38.2% of shared checkouts with InPost and 32.3% with Evri. The calculated complements put InPost first in 61.8% and Evri first in 67.7%. Those figures describe each carrier pair, not all UK shops. Tembi separately notes that 61.8% of Royal Mail checkouts show no other carrier; the repeated number has a different denominator. The evidence points to two distinct positions for Royal Mail: standing alone at many shops, and being listed behind particular rivals where alternatives exist. It does not prove that shoppers choose the first-listed carrier or that ordering determines completed purchases.
Price is a hypothesis, not the measured explanation. The source frames Evri and InPost as less expensive rivals, but supplies no comparable delivery-fee table or controlled test of price. Tembi's checkout monitoring records the options presented by retailers. The selected evidence measures presence and ordering, not consumer preference, service quality or parcel revenue. Its observation window, overall UK sample count and pairwise sample sizes are undisclosed. The large-shop score is a proprietary classification, not a published sales threshold. Use the findings to identify accounts worth investigating, then inspect actual fees, delivery promises and option order before attributing the pattern to cheaper shipping.
Why it matters: Carrier reach is a useful opening metric, but it leaves two commercial questions unanswered: which retailers are covered, and how visible is the offer beside rivals? For Royal Mail, large-shop availability and first position against Evri merit separate account reviews. For a retailer, the practical test is to compare option order with actual selection and delivery margin before changing the menu. Monitor those measures within comparable merchant groups. A broad footprint alone cannot tell you whether the valuable orders follow it.
Images: Cover AI-generated
