Along his road trip through New Mexico and Colorado, Justin Capogna would place an Amazon order to pick up at an Amazon locker along his route, but when he made it to the more rural areas of Wyoming and Montana, he ran into issues trying to find a locker to pick up his packages.
Capogna said Amazon’s pickup recommendations weren’t very helpful because they’re based on a current location, so he coded up the initial version of a website that established a map of Amazon locker locations across the U.S.
“As it turns out, as I was driving, there were lockers along the way; they just weren't in towns that I ever looked in. In this example, in Montana, there were three lockers there. There's a larger quantity today, but there were three, and there was one along the way, so it was there the whole time,” he said. “I shared this tool that I created with the RV community, and people loved it because it was really solving a problem they were having. And over the next year or two, it was getting thousands of monthly users.”
The website, called LockerMap, was launched in 2022 as a personal project for the software developer born out of sheer necessity, but he has since expanded the tool to a new demographic: truck drivers.
The website is free to use with the option for a paid upgrade.
Users can select their country and enter an address, choose the type of pickup location (locker or counter) and filter by hours of operation. The search will yield the address of an Amazon locker or counter, and the user can add that address to their Amazon address book. At the Amazon checkout, they then choose the locker from their saved addresses.
Capogna more recently upgraded the website with trucker-friendly features that include the option to filter based on route and based on truck stop locations.
These features are offered with a paid subscription of $7.99 per month or $79.99 annually.
Truckers can enter their start location and their destination and filter for lockers as few as five miles away and as many as 120 miles off their route.
“The way these lockers work is your order can sit in the locker for three days, and then if you don't pick it up, it gets automatically returned,” Capogna said. “So if you know that in the next three to five days you will be in this area, you can go ahead and order to a locker in that area.”
A challenge drivers face is that they’re constantly on the move, so if they break down or encounter weather or traffic, they have that three-day window.
Another challenge – and maybe the most obvious – is parking.
“Amazon lockers are really great because they let you order off of Amazon wherever you are, which is convenient, but if you're driving and living out of a truck, the challenge is that a lot of these lockers are at grocery stores, or they're at coffee shops or things like that. They’re at places where either they aren't along your way – even if you’re willing to drive there – or there isn't any parking to leave your truck,” Capogna said. “So what truckers were asking … is there any way you can tell us which locations have room that would allow us to park our trucks. I was like, ‘Hmm, I don't know how to do that, but what I can tell you is which locations are actually at truck stops.’”
Drivers can use the truck stop filter to find locations at or near truck stops along their route. The website also includes details like available truck parking spaces at that location.
Amazon lockers were launched in 2011, and Capogna said the number of lockers located at truck stops is growing rapidly. There are currently over 600 locations, specifically at truck stops. Capogna pulls data from Amazon every couple of weeks to see new locations so he can add them to the map.
