Evri
How being Britain's most hated courier became Evri's business model. Pre-tax profit just hit a record £176m.
ALL BREAKDOWNSTHE BREAKDOWNFEATURE
10/1/20265 min read
How being Britain's most hated courier became Evri's business model
Pre-tax profit just hit a record £176m.
807 million parcels delivered in a year.
Three years running as Britain's worst rated delivery company.
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The setup
Evri handles about 3 million parcels a day at peak, and it delivered over 807 million of them last year.
Revenue went from £1.5bn to £1.85bn in three years. EBITDA nearly doubled to £341m. Pre-tax profit hit a record £176m.
Ofcom ranked Evri last for customer satisfaction in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Evri paid its private equity owner a £108m dividend in the same year it finished bottom of that table for the third year running. The business has changed hands twice since 2020.
Advent bought it first, then Apollo for around £2.7bn, before it merged with DHL's UK arm in 2025. Otto, Advent and Apollo each inherited a company that kept finishing last with Ofcom but delivered stellar profits.
Evri's contracts sit with retailers, with Vinted, Etsy and thousands of other ecommerce sellers. They do not sit with the person waiting at home. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, goods stay the retailer's responsibility until they reach the buyer. If a parcel goes missing or turns up damaged, the legal claim sits with the retailer, not the courier.
That doesn't mean Evri has no reason to care. Refunds, support costs and lost retailer accounts still land on Evri. It just isn't the side facing legal liability and that is what shapes how much gets spent on fixing it.
That single fact explains the complaints and the growth.
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The playbook
1. Price for the buyer
The retailer picks the courier on price. That only makes sense if a visibly better alternative exists at a similar cost and none does.
According to the Citizens Advice's league table, no UK parcel courier scored above 2.75 out of 5 in any year. The whole sector sits bunched at the bottom, a narrow band of mediocre options at different prices, not a range where paying more buys a happier customer.
Evri invested £32m in customer service and operations in 2023-24. The investment happened. The ranking didn't move.
That's the choice retailers are making. Not "better courier or Evri." Just "which mediocre courier costs the least."
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Takeaway: If the person paying you never uses the product, their satisfaction score matters less than whether a meaningfully better option exists at the same price.
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2. Scale the workforce without owning it
Evri's courier network runs almost entirely on self-employed drivers paid per parcel, not per hour, under the "Self-Employed Plus" contract that survived a 2018 employment tribunal. That structure means the workforce expands and contracts with parcel volume automatically. There's no large employed fleet to staff up before Christmas and cut back in January, no holiday pay, sick pay or employer's National Insurance sitting on the books as volumes rise.
That's the part of the model driving the numbers. Revenue grew by roughly a quarter over three years. Profit outpacing revenue at that rate only happens when each extra parcel costs almost the same to handle as the last one and a workforce paid by the package does exactly that.
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Takeaway: Growth is expensive when the cost base grows with it. Evri built a cost base that barely moves with growth and that is where the profit comes from.
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3. Let volume carry what service investment won't
Yodel tried the same playbook. Self-employed couriers, low-cost pricing, minimal service spend. But the model has one condition and Yodel never met it: you need enough parcels moving through the network for the arithmetic to work.
Evri's automated hubs cost roughly the same to run whether they sort 400 million parcels a year or 800 million. So the more parcels that go through, the less each one costs to handle. Evri delivers over 807 million parcels a year. That's enough volume to make rock-bottom retailer pricing still profitable, because the cost per parcel keeps falling as the number of parcels keeps rising.
Yodel never got that volume. Revenue fell from £555.7m to £487.6m and the pre-tax loss hit £105.2m. Without enough parcels to spread the fixed cost of the network, low pricing just meant thin revenue against costs that stayed high. It sold for £1 in February 2024 and InPost picked up what was left.
DPD and InPost didn't try to win on low price and minimal service. They used employed or franchised drivers instead of gig couriers, a different cost structure entirely and grew profitably without the reputation problem. They're evidence that you can run a UK parcel business without ending up being hated.
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Takeaway: cutting service investment isn't a strategy on its own. It only turns into profit once volume is high enough to spread the fixed costs thin. Below that line, the same playbook produces Yodel, not Evri.
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One more thing
Evri's biggest exposure was never a Trustpilot score. Bad reviews don't force a company to change anything. Regulators can.
The courier network itself was built on a legal fight, years ago. In 2018, a Leeds employment tribunal, GMB v Hermes, forced the company into a contract called "Self-Employed Plus." Evri still runs its couriers on that same contract today. It's the reason per-delivery costs stay low enough for the whole pricing model to work. Couriers aren't employees, so Evri doesn't carry the costs that come with employing them.
That's been enough to survive customer complaints. It hasn't been tested against political pressure. In November 2023, Labour MP Carolyn Harris raised more than 40,000 constituent complaints about Evri in Parliament. A select committee then heard directly from courier whistleblowers about pay and conditions inside the network. In December 2025, BBC Panorama filmed a courier dumping parcels behind a fence and found pay records showing rates as low as 35p per delivery.
None of that has touched how Evri makes money. Retailers still carry the legal risk when something goes wrong. But there's a difference between a bad review and a select committee. A customer can only choose not to use a company. A regulator can force every courier in the market to meet a higher standard, Evri included, whether Evri wants to raise its own standard or not.
Evri Premium looks like it's built with exactly that risk in mind. It moves the parcels a retailer cares most about onto a separate network with more resource behind it, while everything else carries on exactly as before. Evri hasn't said that's why the product exists. But it's what you'd build if you wanted an answer ready for the day a regulator asks why service is so poor.
Evri didn't succeed despite being hated. It succeeded because being hated was cheaper than being liked.
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THE PAPER TRAIL
Daily Mail, Evri driver stands on parcel to fit letterbox, 2026
2 minute read
Ring doorbell footage of a courier literally standing on a customer's Oliver Bonas parcel to force it through the letterbox.
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Grazia, "Do You Have Evri Rage?", 2024
3 minute read
A cultural trend piece treating Evri complaints as a shared national experience, complete with the "Oh god Evri have delivered my parcel...somewhere"
https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/in-the-news/evri-rage/
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The Tab, How Evri became the most hated delivery company in Britain, 2023
5 minute read
Documenting the 30,000-member Facebook "Evri Complaints" group and the Twitter vigilante who built a 4,000-follower page just to name and shame the company.
https://thetab.com/2023/01/06/evri-customer-service-tracker-complaints
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