European postal operators plan to ‘interconnect’ their B2C parcel services to offer day-certaincross-border delivery services with full end-to-end visibility under a new IPC initiative designed
to target the booming e-commerce market.Under the ‘Interconnect’ programme, participating Posts will create an end-to-end parceldelivery service to provide better cross-border deliveries in Europe, Mark Harrison, IPC’s head ofmarkets, said at the Post-Expo Operations and Technology conference in Vienna last week. He did notindicate the number of participants or give a timescale for the rollout.
The key customer needs included “consistent visibility” through tracking and tracing ofcross-border parcels, day-certain transit times, a choice of delivery points, returns options andbetter customer service, he explained.
“We are working to facilitate interconnection between IPC member networks,” Harrison said. “We want to provide a service where all the items would be visible.” At present, about 70 per centof cross-border parcels in the EU are untracked packets weighing less than 2kgs.
The implications of an ‘interconnected’ cross-border service included one postal operatortaking ‘end-to-end responsibility’ for the parcel and, in the long-term, a “consensus” betweenPosts over cross-border products and services, he commented.
According to IPC research, the European cross-border e-commerce parcels market could grow 75per cent from €3.9 billion in 2010 to €6.8 billion by 2020, Harrison said. Postal operators couldgenerate a combined additional €1.2 billion in annual profits by 2020 by providing ‘interconnected’cross-border parcel deliveries, he predicted.
The IPC initiative follows the European Commission’s Green Paper on cross-border deliveriesin the EU, which identified various obstacles to the growth of cross-border e-commerce. The EC isdue to publish the results of industry consultation on the Green Paper later this year.
The Interconnect programme goes beyond existing IPC activities such as the 31-member E-ParcelGroup (EPG), which provides a cross-border service for priority parcels, including tracking andautomated customer service via linked call centres, using the members’ delivery networks, and the22-member Easy Return Solution for returns of cross-border e-commerce parcels. The EPG has recentlyexpanded to 31 postal operators with Cyprus Post and Croatia Post as new members.
In a separate move, IPC and PostEurop recently signed an agreement to enhance theircooperation in order to boost e-commerce potential for postal operators in Europe.
