Paul O’Reilly has spent 20 years at Wickes. He’s watched the UK home improvement retailer—founded in 1854, with stores across Britain—grow from a no-fuss DIY supplier into something far more ambitious. Today, Wickes takes customers from kitchen inspiration through to finished installation, serving everyone from weekend decorators to full-time tradespeople. When O’Reilly stepped into the Head of Customer Fulfilment role in September 2025, he inherited a strong fulfilment network.
There was just one piece missing.
Same-day delivery.
Wickes had a strong national next-day service. But the market was shifting. Grocery had normalised same-day. Food delivery apps had trained consumers to expect their order within the hour. And Wickes’ customers—particularly the contractors, plumbers, and decorators who rely on the business for trade materials—were starting to want the same.
“Speed, convenience, and choice are probably the key three elements that our consumers want to see.”
The challenge wasn’t simply finding a faster courier. Wickes’ range is unusually demanding—spanning small items all the way up to a single customer order of 800 kilograms. That’s exactly the kind of complexity Metapack builds for in home improvement and DIY: bulky, multi-part orders that need smarter routing rules, not just a fast courier. It set the evaluation bar high.
Wickes’ relationship with Metapack predates Rapid by years. Long before same-day delivery entered the conversation, Metapack was already the backbone of how Wickes gets orders to customers: presenting delivery options and building the delivery calendar at checkout, booking the customer’s chosen delivery date, allocating the carrier once a store has picked the order, and routing cancellations back through the system.
“We’ve been partnered with Metapack for years—from the evolution of our national delivery service through to our carrier network.”
That existing foundation is what turned “add a same-day carrier” into a configuration exercise rather than a rebuild. When Wickes began searching the market for a same-day partner in early 2025, three things mattered: genuine customer focus, robust technology, and full UK reach.
Gophr stood out on all three—and because Wickes already ran its carrier network through Metapack’s carrier-agnostic platform, plugging in a new carrier meant setting up the carrier, building allocation rules, configuring shipping rules and cutoff times, and adding Gophr to the service group, rather than standing up new infrastructure.
“The Gophr integration through Metapack, because we’ve already got that relationship with other fulfilment channels and other carriers, was pretty seamless. No real challenges.”
Wickes’ team leans on that relationship directly day to day. For changes like these, requests go through Metapack’s support portal, and Wickes builds Metapack’s turnaround time into its own development timeline—a rhythm that’s become part of how the two companies plan new launches together.
Wickes named its same-day proposition Rapid, and the name delivers on its promise. At checkout, customers choose between same-day and next-day delivery. If they choose Rapid, the order flows through Metapack, which routes it to Gophr. Gophr receives visibility only once the store team has picked and confirmed the order—and from that moment, the clock starts.
Three hours. From confirmation to the customer’s door.
The proposition serves two distinct audiences. DIY customers love it when they realize they’re short a tin of paint or a box of tiles mid-project. Trade customers—whose time on-site is money—need it even more. O’Reilly sees the trade side as a significant growth opportunity: once a tradesperson has experienced the speed of same-day home improvement delivery, the behavior tends to stick.
Since launch, Rapid has consistently led Wickes’ fulfilment channels in customer satisfaction. Around 90% of customers rate the service as excellent—with the feedback clustering around a single theme: I wanted it, and I got it, and I got on with my project.
“About 96% of our customers today have been delivered within that promise, which is a really high success rate.”
The proposition is also proving genuinely incremental. Rapid hasn’t pulled demand away from next-day—it has created a new reason to order. O’Reilly describes it simply: “It’s not cannibalizing any other channel. It’s just a new choice.”
O’Reilly describes the current service as phase one. There’s more innovation planned for the same-day proposition—more trade exposure, more development across the network, more capability to build. The foundation is solid, the results are strong, and the partnership between Wickes, Gophr, and Metapack is what O’Reilly credits as the engine behind all of it.
“None of this can be done without the right partnership and the right collaboration. Any obstacle we’ve come across, we’ve managed to find a way to work through it together.”
For any retailer looking to move from same-day ambition to same-day delivery, that combination—the right carrier, the right integration, the right partner—is exactly where to start.
Ready to connect your carriers and launch new delivery propositions faster? Talk to the Metapack team.
of customers rate the Rapid service as "excellent"
of orders delivered within the three-hour promise
Driving incremental revenue—no cannibalization of existing channels
