Paczkomaty is one of the best revolutions in the post delivery industry. So convenient.

I still prefer regular post, Poczta Polska.

They try to deliver to home, but if there is noone there, they leave a note, and I have 14 days to receive items on nearest post office (same walk distance as Paczkomat, open 8am-8pm + Saturday). Plenty of time for me (or roommate!) to get all packages that arrived to house. Just one person in household can go every 2 weeks and collect dozen packages and letters.

In Paczkomat, item is returned to sender after 48 hours. With such short time and need for SMS code, no chance that roommate will collect packages for me.

The only advantage of Paczkomat is that you can use it at night.

I don't think it works that way. After 48 hours, a package is transferred to the nearest InPost POP, where you can retrieve it within 3 days.

Finnish Posti also started installing those in 2011, now they have ~500 of them (~1 per 11000 pop).

They've also recently started installing similar machines to apartment buildings (somewhat similar to OP Amazon things I guess).

These are pretty great. One of the big surprises of moving to Finland was that the postal service will __never__ deliver a parcel to your door.

Cards, very small packets, and letters all get delivered Monday-Friday, but parcels? They leave a card and you have to take it to your local post-office to collect your item.

I'd visited Finland a lot prior to moving, but of course this is the kind of thing you don't realize until you've relocated "for real". In the past I used to do a lot of online ordering, but since moving I've cut down a lot just because collection of things is a real pain. (Of course it helps that there is no Amazon.fi, instead the choices seem to be Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.de.)

Yeah, regular parcels are not delivered to door, and most people don't want to pay the extra for door delivery. And nowadays many just redirect their parcels to a parcel box on their commute / supermarket via the Posti app/site.

Amazon.co.uk and amazon.de that you mentioned (and some other foreign sites), though, always seem to use to-door services even in Finland. The most common one has been DHL Weltpaket Premium which Posti tries to deliver once by 14:00 (sig.req), after that it goes to post office for pickup. Of course I'm never home at that time.

Amazon.fi redirects to amazon.de nowadays, BTW, which has free shipping to Finland for 39€+ orders.

It does happen at times, but it's very arbitrary if and when it happens.

I like SmartPosti parcel boxes as well, especially how I can select the delivery target that most suits my route and schedule. I usually use one that's close to my work in a mall so I can do some groceries while getting my packages.

Yeah I tend to order ESP8266 devices and random sensors, from AliExpress. Although the postage often takes 3-8 weeks its a little hit and miss whether the packets are delivered or have to be collected.

Mostly these days I tend to use verkkokauppa and similar "local" shops that can be collected from.

I absolutely love them. They solve the problem of coordinating delivery times by... just letting me choose the pickup point that's active 24/7, so I can visit it e.g. at 9 PM while coming home from work. I always use them if I can (so sad I can't with Aliexpress :().

I think those are a great idea, I hope they come to my country sometime.

I was about to mention these.