A US Print Materials Seller Moves Order Handover to a Pickup Locker Wall — Then Orders More Cabinets

For a print materials business, handing orders over can take more effort than selling them. Customers order online or by phone, and an order is only ready once it has been printed, cut and packed — so completion times vary from order to order.

The people collecting those orders are mostly running businesses of their own. They are busy during the day, and by the time they can come by, the shop has often already closed.

The result was waiting on both sides. Finished orders piled up in the shop. Staff called customers one by one to arrange a pickup time, and customers had to rush over within business hours just to collect a single order. Once the doors closed, the handover process simply stopped.

The business did not extend its opening hours or add evening staff. Instead, it handed the handover step to a LinQu self-service pickup locker:

1. Staff deposit. When an order is ready, a staff member logs in on the locker with an employee account, chooses a free compartment of the right size, enters the customer's phone number, places the order inside and closes the door. The system records who deposited it, which compartment it is in and when.
2. The system sends a code. As soon as the deposit is complete, the system generates a unique pickup code and sends it to the customer by SMS. No app is needed.
3. The customer collects. At the shop, the customer taps Pickup on the screen and enters the code. The matching door opens automatically; the customer takes the order and closes the door, and the pickup time is logged. Whether the shop is open or not makes no difference.
4. Exceptions are covered. Expired or mistyped codes trigger a prompt, uncollected orders trigger reminders, administrators can open a compartment remotely from the back office, and every action is kept in the operation log.

The lockers stand along one side of the shop. Main cabinets with screens and secondary cabinets are joined into an L-shaped pickup wall, with large and small compartments mixed: small single-item orders go into small compartments, boxed or rolled orders into large ones. The cabinets are built for US power (110–120V / 60Hz, Type A / B plugs), so they only need to be plugged in and connected to the network on site.

Staff deposit plus code pickup took order handover out of business hours. Customers can now collect their orders after the shop has closed, and staff place the day's finished orders into the locker before they leave instead of calling customers one by one to agree a time.

What happened next says the most: the business came back and ordered more main and secondary cabinets, expanding the original locker into the full pickup wall it has today.

Because LinQu lockers are built from main and secondary cabinets, expanding did not mean starting over. New cabinets were joined to the existing ones and are managed in the same back office.

For buyers looking at something similar: you do not have to size the whole wall on day one. Start with one main cabinet, see which compartment size fills up first, and add that size next.