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What Happens to Your Parcel After You Order From Keylink
From Our Warehouse to Your Door: What Happens After You Order from Keylink
On a warm Tuesday evening at the beginning of September, some of the Keylink team hopped in a car and followed the last DPD collection of the day to the hub in Hinckley, to find out what happens to your parcels after they leave our warehouse. Here’s what happened next…
by Lyndsey Hall
20 Sept 2025
On arrival at Hub 4, we were greeted by our account manager, Darren, and his boss, Steph, who gave us visitor badges and showed us to one of the comfy meeting rooms overlooking the sorting office floor to find out what we’d be getting up to during our visit. They also told us all about DPD’s service and sustainability goals.
DPD’s Hub 4 opened in 2015 to serve customers in the east of the country via the M1, and a second, larger regional hub, Hub 5, was added in 2020. When it was first built, Hub 5 was the largest fully automated domestic parcel hub in Europe! With over 6,000 solar panels, it’s also DPD’s most eco-friendly and technologically advanced hub to date. The hubs are automated for accuracy and efficiency, with minimal manual handling involved.
You can learn more about DPD’s sustainability initiatives here:
https://sustainability.dpd.co.uk/
And discover their 1-2-3-4 strategy for providing the best service in their industry:
How many parcels do DPD process per day?
We were taken on a tour around the sorting office floor and shown the various areas for large and small parcels, and the bay doors where several trailers were being loaded by DPD’s friendly sorting team.
At the time of our visit, approximately 1.4 million parcels a day were being processed across the entire DPD network, but at peak times (Black Friday and Christmas), this number is much higher.
Hub 4, we were told, features 282 active bay doors for trailers, and receives over 400 trailers per day. At least a couple of those per day are packed full of Keylink orders!
What happens to my parcel after I order from Keylink?
The final collection from Keylink’s warehouse in Dinnington, Sheffield happens before 4pm Monday to Friday, so if you order before 3pm, you’ll receive your parcel on the next working day. The boxes are loaded into the lorry and taken to Hub 4 in Hinckley, Leicestershire, where they’re unloaded onto the conveyor belts and sorted into the correct trailers for delivery the following day.
30kg is the maximum weight per parcel for DPDs conveyors, so if your order contains more than 30kg of chocolate and other ingredients, your delivery will be split into two or more boxes, to minimise the amount of manual handling involved, as this increases the delivery costs.
How DPD deals with incorrect and missing address labels
We were also shown the lost and found area, where parcels that can’t be automatically sorted because of missing address labels. Some of these would have lost their address stickers somewhere in transit, and if there is an invoice inside the box a new label will be printed and the parcel will be sent on its merry way without too much of a delay. For reused boxes, if the old labels aren’t removed or covered, the automated system is unable to work out which address is correct and some manual handling becomes necessary to help it continue on its journey. But unfortunately, for some parcels, there’s no address label and no invoice, and the boxes sit in the lost and found area waiting for the customer to contact DPD and identify their missing parcel. These are kept for a long time, in the hopes that they can be reunited with their intended recipient eventually!
We really enjoyed our visit to DPD’s Hub 4 and found it absolutely fascinating watching all of the parcels travelling through the sorting system on the way to their final destination. We each came home with a DPD coffee cup and water bottle, and a miniature DPD van for our desks!
If you’ve got any questions about the delivery process from Keylink to DPD to your home or business, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’re happy to answer any questions about our delivery service that you might have, and anything we can’t answer we can ask our friendly account manager at DPD, Darren!
Lyndsey is a marketing executive, writer and lover of books and chocolate from Sheffield.
Her favourite chocolate is Cacao Barry Lactee Superieure.
