Shopfitting and Retail Display Delivery Across the UK

Retail fit-out delivery is governed by the shopping centre, not by the shopfitter. The centre decides which service yard you use, what time the slot is, which lift you may use and what it is rated for, and whether your vehicle fits under the barrier. Miss the slot and the next one may be tomorrow.

T&C Logistics delivers for shopfitters, fit-out contractors, display manufacturers and retail brands - single store refits, rollout programmes across multiple sites, and pop-up and concession installations. We have run specialist transport since 2020 with over 2,400 deliveries completed and more than 3,000 vetted driver-partners nationwide, working overnight and weekends as standard for retail. Goods-in-transit cover is £50,000 per consignment, rising to £1,000,000 through partners. Quotes from £50 (ex VAT), quoted in full upfront.

What shopfitting equipment does T&C Logistics deliver?

Gondola and wall bay systems, slatwall and gridwall panels, counters and cash desks, display tables, mannequins, garment rails, shelving, signage, lightboxes and fitting-room components - flat-packed and assembled.

Retail equipment is rarely heavy but frequently long, flat and easily marked. A gondola bay end is bulky rather than dense; a laminated counter section is heavy on one edge and marks if slid; a full-height mannequin is light, fragile and worth several hundred pounds. The transport challenge is protecting finished surfaces on items that will be visible to customers within days.

Vehicle choice is usually a Luton van with tail lift or a 7.5-tonne truck for a full store load.

How do shopping centre deliveries actually work?

Through a booked service-yard slot, usually outside trading hours, with a goods lift that has a posted capacity and a height restriction on the yard entrance. Every centre publishes its own rules and they are not negotiable on the day.

The details that decide whether a delivery succeeds are consistent across centres: the barrier height at the service yard entrance, which commonly rules out high-roof vehicles; the booked slot length, after which the bay must be clear; the goods lift internal dimensions and load rating; and whether the delivery route from lift to unit crosses public mall area, which many centres prohibit during trading.

Give us the centre name, the slot time, the yard height restriction and the lift capacity when you book. Where you do not have them, the centre's delivery office will - and it is a five-minute call that prevents a rejected vehicle. Our night courier van covers the common overnight pattern and vehicles are ULEZ-compliant for central London sites.

Can you deliver overnight so the store keeps trading?

Yes, and for occupied stores that is usually the only workable option. Refits of trading stores run overnight, with the shop floor cleared before opening.

The overnight pattern for retail is tight: the store closes, the fit-out team gets access, materials must be in the unit early enough to be installed, and everything must be finished and cleared before doors open. A delivery that arrives at 02:00 for a job that needed to start at 22:00 has cost the contractor the night.

We schedule to the access time, not to a delivery window, and drivers work overnight and weekends across the network. Where the centre requires a permit-to-work or an induction for the delivery crew, tell us in advance - it takes time on site and it is a common cause of missed slots. See our retail industry hub for related work.

Do you handle rollout programmes across multiple stores?

Yes. A rollout is a sequence of identical deliveries to different postcodes on fixed dates, which makes it a routing problem rather than a series of individual bookings.

Brand rollouts - new signage across forty stores, a display refresh across a region, a seasonal concession installation - work best when consignments are pre-sorted by store and loaded in delivery order, so the vehicle is not unpacked and repacked at every stop. Where stores are geographically clustered, one vehicle covering six sites in a night is substantially cheaper than six separate jobs.

What makes rollouts fail is address and access data. A store list with correct service-yard entrances, slot times and site contacts is worth more than any amount of vehicle capacity. We will work from your schedule and report completion per site, with GPS tracking on every vehicle.

Who installs the fixtures?

Your fit-out team. We deliver to the unit and place items where the team wants them; we do not assemble, fix, install or connect.

The boundary is worth stating because retail fit-out is a trade with its own site requirements - working at height, electrical connection of lightboxes and illuminated fixtures, fixing into walls and floors, and compliance with the centre's permit-to-work regime. Work equipment on site falls under the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, and any lifting operation under the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998.

What we do provide is placement in the right order. Telling us that the counter sections go to the back of the unit and the gondola packs stay by the door saves your team moving several hundred kilograms twice. For exhibition and pop-up installation work see our trade show and exhibition installation service.

Can you take packaging and old fixtures away?

Yes. A retail fit-out generates a substantial volume of packaging and stripped-out fixtures, and most shopping centres will not accept it into their waste stream.

This catches contractors out regularly. The centre's bins are sized for the tenants' trading waste, not for a store's worth of cardboard, pallets and old gondola bays, and leaving it in the service yard is normally a chargeable breach. The waste has to leave with someone, and taking it out on the vehicle that brought the new fixtures is the cheapest way to do it.

T&C Logistics is registered with the Environment Agency as an upper tier waste carrier, broker and dealer under registration number CBDU654368, so we can lawfully carry it. Electrical fixtures such as illuminated lightboxes fall under the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations 2013 when scrapped. We carry to a partner-operated permitted facility; we do not treat or recycle, and documentation is issued by the processor. See our WEEE collection service.

What information makes a retail delivery succeed?

Six things, and a delivery that has all six almost never fails: centre or store name, service yard entrance, booked slot time, yard height restriction, goods lift capacity, and an on-site contact who will actually answer a phone at that hour.

The last one is underrated. An overnight delivery to a store where nobody answers the door is a vehicle standing in a service yard burning its slot, and the driver has no route to escalate. A named contact with a mobile number that is switched on during the window prevents most of the failures we see in retail work.

For rollout programmes, that information needs to exist per store rather than as a general note, because it varies between sites in the same brand. Building it once into your store list makes every subsequent rollout cheaper. Deliveries are GPS-tracked so you can see vehicle position against the slot in real time.

Can you hold fixtures between manufacture and installation?

Storage is not part of our transport service, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. What we can do is time the collection to the installation date so the fixtures do not need storing.

This is a common gap in fit-out programmes. Fixtures are manufactured to a lead time, the store handover slips, and suddenly a container's worth of gondola bays needs somewhere to live for three weeks. The manufacturer usually has limited space, the site has none, and the contractor ends up paying for short-notice storage at a premium.

The cheaper answer is nearly always a collection date set from the install date rather than the manufacture date, with the manufacturer holding the goods until then. Where that is not possible, arrange storage directly with a provider and we will collect from there. Telling us the real install date at booking - not the optimistic one - is what makes this work.

What does shopfitting delivery cost?

One fixed price per dedicated job, quoted upfront, fuel and goods-in-transit insurance included. Retail fit-out consignments are not put on a shared parcel network, where finished surfaces would not survive.

From £50 (ex VAT). Final price depends on distance, vehicle, urgency and time - quoted in full upfront before you book. Related: commercial refrigeration transport for store chillers and furniture transport. Call 0121 720 3841 or use our contact page.