Here’s a small experiment. Ask someone in Hungary what Alza sells and they’ll say electronics. Ask them if Alza sells shampoo and they’ll pause.
It does. It sells shampoo, dog food, protein powder, perfume, cleaning products, teas, baby food and jewellery, and it has done for long enough that the ranges are properly built rather than nominally present. This is the half of the catalogue that most customers never open, and it’s the half that quietly changes how you shop once you find it.
So let’s open it.
The Drugstore Section Is a Real Section
Household chemicals. Cleaning products. Paper goods. Personal care. The whole unglamorous inventory of keeping a home functioning.
This is the category people are most surprised by and the one that makes the most obvious sense once you think about it for four seconds. Drugstore goods are shelf-stable, non-fragile, predictable in size, and bought on a repeating cycle. That is exactly the product profile that works best in a parcel locker network. There’s nothing about washing-up liquid that requires you to carry it home from a shop.
And it’s the category where the delivery model does the most work. Order it by midnight, collect it from a locker down the road in the morning, without a delivery charge if you’re an AlzaPlus+ member. The alternative is a trip you didn’t want to make, carrying things you didn’t want to carry.
The mistake people make is thinking of this as a separate shopping mission. It isn’t. It’s a thing you add to a basket you were already filling.
Beauty, Perfume and Jewellery
Perfume and jewellery has its own category, and it sits next to a personal-care range that runs through electric toothbrushes, hair and beard care, and beauty devices.
That combination is more useful than it sounds. The beauty device market — the styling tools, the skincare gadgets, the grooming kit — is a genuinely difficult one to buy in, because it’s flooded with things that look identical at wildly different prices. Buying it from a retailer that also sells the fragrance, also sells the toothbrush, and has a return policy that runs well past the legal minimum takes most of the risk out of the experiment.
The generous no-questions return window matters more here than almost anywhere. Beauty and grooming purchases are, more than any other category, things you can’t evaluate until you’ve lived with them for a week. Being able to send it back without constructing an argument is the difference between trying something and not bothering.
The Food Category Is Cleverer Than It Looks
This one deserves attention because people assume it’s a supermarket play and dismiss it. It isn’t.
The food range is healthy foods, sports nutrition, alternative diets, dried meats, teas, syrups, baby food, dietary supplements, and gift hampers — plus advent calendars when the season arrives.
Look at that list again. Not one item on it is a fresh grocery run. Every single one is shelf-stable, high-value relative to its weight, bought on a cycle, and completely miserable to carry. Protein powder is heavy. Supplements are bought monthly and forgotten until you’ve run out. Speciality teas and alternative-diet products are the exact things your local shop doesn’t stock, which is why people who need them order online anyway.
This isn’t Alza pretending to be a grocer. It’s Alza noticing which food products actually belong in an e-commerce catalogue and stocking those, properly.
The sports nutrition side in particular pairs neatly with the sport and leisure category sitting next to it. If you’re buying the equipment, you’re probably buying the supplements. Being able to do both without switching sites is exactly the sort of small convenience that decides where people shop by default.
Pets
Pet supplies and pet food is a full category. Food, equipment, the lot.
The logic is identical to drugstore and identical to sports nutrition. Pet food is heavy, bought on a completely predictable cycle, and there’s absolutely no reason to carry it. It’s one of the purest cases for automated delivery to a locker near your flat that exists in retail.
There’s also a smart pet section inside the smart home range — the feeders, the trackers, the cameras — which is the sort of cross-category coherence that happens when a retailer has been paying attention rather than bolting on departments.
Health, Toys, Babies and the Rest
Health has its own category, covering the equipment and monitoring end.
Toys and baby-and-mother is substantial, and it connects to the baby food in the grocery range and the toys in the gifting section. Parents buy across all three constantly, and having them in one basket is worth more to a tired parent than any discount.
Sport and leisure covers the equipment. Home, DIY and garden covers the tools and the outdoor side, with a smart garden section attached. Car and motorcycle covers the vehicle end. Office supplies covers the working end, including Alza’s own paper, cartridges and cleaning products.
None of these are token categories. They’re all built out with real depth.
The Deals Run Through Here Too
This is the bit people miss entirely, because they assume the promotions only apply to the shiny half of the catalogue.
They don’t. The Mega Price Parade sweeps across the whole site, and its price-banded sub-events — where everything under a given threshold is reduced — land disproportionately in exactly these departments, because that’s where the affordable things live. Alza Days does the same. There’s a dedicated AlzaPlus+ member shelf with prices you only see if you’re a member, and it isn’t restricted to electronics either.
So the routine is the same as it would be for a laptop, just faster. Glance at the live event before you fill the basket. If the shampoo you buy every month happens to be in a promotion this week, you’d rather know now than next month.
And the repeat-purchase nature of these categories makes that compounding in a way it never is with tech. You buy one laptop every five years. You buy detergent forever. A small saving on the thing you buy forever is worth considerably more than a big saving on the thing you buy once.
What Sells
The bestseller shelves here tell a different story from the tech ones, and it’s a more honest one.
In electronics, top sellers usually mean a sharp price this week. In drugstore, food and pet supplies, top sellers mean something else entirely: people came back. Nobody reorders detergent out of enthusiasm. They reorder it because it worked and the reordering was easy.
Predictably, the movers are the repeat items. Electric toothbrush heads. Cleaning and household chemicals. Dry pet food. Protein and supplements. Speciality teas. The things with a cycle attached.
That’s a more useful signal than it looks, because in a category where you genuinely can’t evaluate the product from the listing — one bottle of cleaner looks much like another — repeat purchase is the only quality metric available. The shelf is telling you what people didn’t regret.
Why Buying the Boring Stuff Here Actually Works
Now, the honest question: why would you? You can buy shampoo anywhere.
Three reasons, and they compound.
The first is that you’re already there. If you’re buying a phone charger or a coffee machine, adding the toothbrush heads and the dog food costs you nothing — no extra order, no extra delivery, no extra afternoon indoors. The marginal cost of the boring purchase drops to zero when it’s riding along with something you were buying anyway.
The second is the delivery network. The AlzaBox lockers plus the Packeta, Foxpost and PostaPont pickup points put a collection option within a short walk of most people, open around the clock. That’s the specific thing that makes routine restocking work online. Home delivery requires you to be home. A locker doesn’t require anything except that you walk past it eventually.
The third is AlzaPlus+, which removes the delivery charge from pickup entirely with no minimum order. This is the piece that makes the whole thing click. Without it, ordering a single item of shampoo is silly. With it, it’s the obvious move. The membership doesn’t just save money — it makes small, frequent, boring orders rational, which is what a household actually needs.
And behind all of it, the same return policy, the same customer service running every day of the week, the same secure payment, the same everything that covers the expensive purchases. The infrastructure was built for televisions. The shampoo gets to use it for free.
How to Start
Don’t try to move your whole household shop in one go. That’s not the point and it won’t stick.
Do this instead. Next time you’re buying something from Alza — anything, a cable, a game, a kettle — spend two minutes in the drugstore or food category before you check out. Add the two or three repeating things you know you’re going to need. That’s it.
You’ll notice the pattern almost immediately: the stuff that turns up in the locker is the stuff you stop thinking about. And the stuff you stop thinking about is exactly the stuff that was quietly costing you a trip every fortnight.
If you’re going to do it more than occasionally, get the membership first. It’s the piece that makes the small orders make sense, and everything else follows from it.
Go and look at the categories under the fold. The interesting half of this site is the half you’ve never opened.
