South African Post Office partners with Wish to improve product delivery

The South African Post Office has partnered with e-commerce giant Wish to improve customer experience when ordering from the platform.

Wish parent company ContextLogic Inc announced the partnership on 21 April.

The partnership is the first of its kind for the state-owned service.

“Our mission at Wish is to democratize ecommerce and make it affordable, accessible, and open to all by constantly improving product, process and technology,” Vice President of Operations at Wish, Thomas Chuang, said in a statement.

“The South African market is an important one for the business and our partnership with SAPO will help us to provide faster time to door by 50% or more.”

“This is critical to ensuring a positive customer experience and satisfaction and will enable us to better serve our customers in this market,” Chuang added.

What does the Post Office partnership with Wish mean?

As partners, SAPO and Wish will work together to improve service efficiency. It will also make several changes.

The most prominent change is a decrease in transit times. The partnership aims to make deliveries from Wish 50% faster.

Other changes include introducing end-to-end tracking visibility, delivery confirmation, and bundled shipments for multiple items. It also includes SMS and physical notifications of packages for collection.

“The South African Post Office is staying relevant to the latest e-commerce trends and has improved its tracking system with the implementation of the capability to track international parcels,” SAPO Head of Logistics, Sekano Kgalanyane, said in a statement.

“This empowers customers to track items from dispatch to delivery.”

Kgalayane added the COVID-19 pandemic had resulted in people relying more on e-commerce marketplaces such as Wish.

“We are confident that we will be able to provide a faster, high-quality service to customers throughout South African Post.”

Feature image: Unsplash/Marc Fehr

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