My wife handles the courier for her dad's website, which does retail and wholesale plants, and we've had no luck at all. In the past month we've had east/south london deliveries being carded, sometimes twice, when it's clear that nobody even tried to deliver (one was a gated estate with a security guard, one was our own family), they also lied about when it was supposed to be delivered with excuses like 'oh its a consumer delivery so that can be delivered any time up to 8:30pm' ( it never is, and never does ) or that the driver is running late ( inevitably the driver gave up and went to the pub ). Parcel Force are pretty awful, but Initial CityLink are appalling both for customer and business - for customers they don't deliver, lie about attempting to deliver and fail to follow instructions, for businesses they change prices without warning, give conflicting advice on refunds that take months to get, and generally make the simple job of delivering one box incredibly hard. I don't think there is a good courier out there, and that's probably why Tesco does it itself. I would guess that Tesco is prepared to take make a loss on the delivery in order to get the extra trade. I don't think courier companies could profitably provide the same level of service, primarily because they are so shockingly bad at what they do, rather than it being hard.