Parcel delivery solution provider Corner Drop is using crowd funding website Seedrs to raise £40,000 in return for 3% equity. With 56 days to go it already has 21% of the investment promised, and has already reached the required funds in two previous offers on the same website.

The idea of Corner Drop is that any online shopper can have their goods delivered to a nominated Corner Drop drop off point. When they are free to collect the parcel they give the drop off point business a PIN code and collect the parcel. Corner shops and other businesses in a residential area can sign up for Corner Drop and they are paid 50p + VAT per parcel collected from them.

The company started trading in 2010 with 70 Corner Drops around the UK and now has a large number of businesses that trade with it. 750 businesses work with Corner Drop but the plan of the investment round is to extend this to 2500 nationwide. One of the founders, Andrew Lasota appeared on Dragon’s Den rival TV programme The Monkey Pit last week and secured £12,000 of investment for the business.

Parcel drop off points are a major thrust for the ecommerce delivery business as increasingly busy customers seek new means of collecting their goods without waiting in all afternoon for a parcel delivery. Indeed, research by Shutl recently suggested that as many as 5% of sick days taken by employees could be to wait in for deliveries! Corner Drop’s offering could extend the range of options given to businesses and consumers alike as they seek alternatives to waiting at home for the goods they have bought. Where many companies such as Royal Mail tie people to collecting their goods from specific sites that could be a few miles from their location, the idea of Corner Drop is to make the system much more convenient to the customer.