"Allow 28 Days For Delivery"

Internet shopping is big business: in 2014 over £104bn was spent online in the UK and last year more than three-quarters of all Britons reported buying goods online. While some of those will have been 'click-and-collect' purchases, a large proportion will have been for goods that had to be delivered to the purchaser's home, which accounts for the fact that when I look out of my dining room window there is a good chance that I am going to see a delivery van of some kind. And it seems that it is a rare day when the doorbell isn't rung by a delivery driver bringing a parcel to our home.

The frequency with which we receive a parcel delivered to our door is in sharp contrast to how often we had a home delivery even just a few years ago. As with so many other things, the internet has been responsible for the huge growth in shopping from home. Seeing those delivery vans going up and down our street made me think about how things were before we could order goods online, and before communication improved with the coming of text messaging and email and tracking services that allow us to see exactly when our goods are being delivered.

Neither of my parents had bank accounts until sometime during the 1980's when their employers stopped paying them in cash. Before then paying for large items like furniture or domestic appliances was done with cash or on hire purchase, and if the latter then the instalments had to be paid in cash. The only things that were ever ordered for home delivery were those that were too big to bring home on the bus (neither Mum nor Dad drove, although Dad had a moped which was of little use in transporting anything bulky). If you were lucky enough to be given a date when something would be delivered all you knew was that it should turn up that day, meaning that you had to spend the whole day indoors waiting for it. In the event that the day dragged on and the item had not turned up, you could always telephone to see where you item was, except that until about 1974 my parents didn't even have a phone, so the only way to make a call was to trot off to the nearest phone box. Doing so of course ran the risk that the moment you turned the corner, the blessed lorry with the delivery would turn up.

Worse still were the items you ordered by post. Having filled in the form from the newspaper or magazine, it was off to the Post Office to buy a Postal Order (my parents didn't have a bank account, remember), post it off...and wait. Most of these purchases came with an "allow 28 days for delivery" clause so it was anyone's guess when the purchase would arrive and the chances of actually being in to receive it were slim. As you can imagine, we didn't order very much by post. On one occasion that we did, the item was out of stock and our Postal Order was returned, which meant that not having one of his own, my Dad had to get his brother to pay it into his bank account to get our money back.

Even when you were fairly confident of a delivery date, things could go wrong. By 1990 I had left home and married. My first wife and I ordered a settee which was to be delivered from Wales. On the appointed day, a Friday, I had a phone call to say that due to high winds having closed the Severn Bridge, our settee could not be delivered. A new delivery date was agreed, which was the following Friday. Come Monday morning I was at work and received a call to say that our settee had arrived , but no one was in to take delivery. We ended up having it delivered to my parents' house (fortunately they lived in the same road as us at the time) and had to transport it home in the back of the car - with the tailgate open - later that evening.

It is a while ago - maybe about eighteen years - since I made my first online order and you probably won't be surprised to learn that it was with Amazon, but I can still recall my amazement at being able to place an order at five o'clock in the afternoon and have the good turn up before noon the next day. We now take that sort of thing for granted and with email confirmation that our order has been despatched and with some delivery companies providing tracking numbers that allow the buyer to see exactly what progress their order has made and when it is going to be delivered, the mystery over when things are going to turn up are largely over.

Not entirely, though. At one time we used to order our groceries online from Tesco and in the early days the system worked well. The time came, however when it seemed that the supermarket may have over-extended themselves and having waited more than once until 10pm on a Friday for a delivery promised between 6pm and 8pm, we gave up on online ordering. In fairness, that was a long time ago; they may have improved since we last ordered.

Having gone from the days when ordering goods meant buying a Postal Order, mailing the order and being at the mercy of the seller and the Royal Mail for the actual delivery, we now take ordering goods online and being certain of when they are going to be delivered for granted. And if we can't be in to take delivery, we can always arrange to collect from places like Doddle or from Amazon Locker. Many things we buy don't even need to be physically delivered. Digital downloads of books, music and films mean that we can enjoy our purchase within minutes of ordering the product (download speeds permitting), although despite my attachment to my Kindle, I still quite enjoy reading an actual book and where music is concerned, prefer a CD to a download.

So, where next for online ordering and delivery? Amazon have proposed using drones to make deliveries, but for some products, perhaps there is an even more radical possibility. 3D printers are not yet commonplace - prices are at present prohibitive - but there is no reason why, once these machines become as ordinary as the home computer and inkjet printer, that some physical goods could not be downloaded in the same way as we now download music and films.

That may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but bear in mind that before 1994, when Amazon were founded, just buying things online was non-existent and now it is so normal as to be unremarkable. Who knows? in another twenty years time we may think nothing of downloading something like a toaster and printing it at home.