As mentioned previously, SurePost might take a little longer. Making the last mile more efficient does slow down the delivery process slightly. UPS drivers must pass the packages off to USPS, which then must sort them and ensure they get to the correct addresses. Is it cost effective? But is it slower? But how much slower? UPS states that packages mailed via SurePost may take anywhere from two to seven days until arrival.
The major source of the delay is the transfer of packages from one carrier to the other, but this is also the source of savings. When making the decision about whether this service is right for you, it helps to understand who might benefit most. The best approach is to look at your current shipping costs. Ask this question: Do these shipments need to arrive quickly? If the answer is no, then you may benefit from another option, and in the case of reducing last-mile costs, SurePost is a viable solution.
Gibbs has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and other publications discussing parcel auditing, shipping, e-commerce, and more.
Learn more at www. All rights reserved. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. Do you ship? Get the refunds you deserve! Sign up, sit back, get paid. By Brian Gibbs Last updated on: April 20, UPS Delivery on Saturday! Brian Gibbs President of Refund Retriever Brian Gibbs founded Refund Retriever in while running his first eBay-based business and seeing the shortcomings of other shipment auditing companies.
The very last leg of the journey, the one where a mail carrier has to walk up to each mailbox and fill it, is the part that drives up the price. This is because all other parts of sending mail can be streamlined.
Many parcels can be sorted all at once, and massive distribution centers that use sorting machines and enjoy the cost savings of bulk sorting are very efficient and cost relatively little to run. As soon as parcels are nearly at their destinations, however, prices go up a lot. For independent couriers like UPS, this is because they may only have one delivery to make in an entire block, and that delivery costs them significantly more than if they have ten deliveries in that block.
USPS, however, is delivering to nearly every house on every block every day of the year. With Ground delivery , UPS drivers take parcels to individual houses and deliver them. As described above, this is not very efficient, because they may only have one address in each area to go to, and so drivers are spending a lot of time driving, and not delivering. Because of this, Ground delivery tends to be more expensive.
On average, Ground will be about a day quicker than SurePost, but it will cost quite a lot more. While you may not care if you are an individual shipping out packages now and then, the twenty percent difference can make a huge difference if you are a business sending out parcels every day! With the SurePost system, once the package has reached the area it needs to be in, the UPS driver will take it to a local post office, instead of delivering it to an individual house.
All parcels for that area will be handed to the post office workers, who will log them as received. This done, the post office will sort them into the piles with normal USPS mail that is being sent by the main postal service, and then the mailman will bring them to the door of each house the following day.
This is the part that usually causes the one day delay on SurePost deliveries. With the Ground system, the UPS van would take the mail to the individual houses, rather than to the post office, where it must wait overnight for the mailman.
The only difference between these two systems is how the parcels are handled toward the end of their journey. When it gets to this point, SurePost parcels will be passed to the local post office, while Ground parcels will be distributed via UPS vans to their final destinations. This is all that makes a difference in the two postal systems. So, if the SurePost system is cheaper, the first question is how much cheaper?
Obviously, rates change, but to give you an approximate idea, in the last couple of years, SurePost rates have been as follows:. These are only estimates, but often, SurePost will work out around twenty percent cheaper per parcel you ship, which obviously makes a massive difference to businesses.
Steep shipping prices can easily deter customers, so all businesses looking to compete are trying to find ways to reduce the cost of their shipping. Many businesses offer free shipping and swallow the cost themselves, and this is expensive. Being able to reduce that cost, whether it is passed on to the customer or taken by the business, is an enormous benefit that can make a big competitive difference, especially if the business sells low value items in bulk, and so ships lots of packages.
One day added to the estimated shipping is not a big price to pay when it comes to this cost, and a business can — if they choose — offer both the cheap option and the more expensive Ground option, so that customers who are on a tight deadline can still buy from them and get their item in time. This represents the best of both worlds, as most customers will not care if their parcel takes one day longer, but will care about paying higher shipping costs. If the business is sending SurePost items for free, it is possible to calculate the additional shipping charge for Ground and pass only this cost on to the customer, keeping the shipping costs down while ensuring that the business is not losing money for shipping things more quickly.
While these services are not the answer for shipping every package, they are compelling option for a customer who is price sensitive, but not time sensitive. When implementing this service into my own business, I added it as the lowest cost delivery option at a flat rate cost. Promoting a flat shipping rate avoids sticker shock at checkout. I find these services to be a good fit in this regard. Pros Reduced shipping costs. Pricing is lower than conventional ground service.
This is why UPS and FedEx will tack on delivery area and residential areas surcharges to your base ground rates. Consolidated services like SurePost and SmartPost eliminate these charges by delivering packages from many different vendors directly to the local USPS office branch that normally handles their mail delivery. UPS and FedEx get to make just one stop to deliver many packages, and the USPS letter carrier who is going to be driving by every house in a residential area on his daily route is not having to modify his route.
The savings that these efficiencies bring is passed on to you, the merchant. However, USPS has no such delivery surcharge. Thus, a package that UPS or FedEx would normally wait until Monday to deliver might actually show up earlier than expected and on a Saturday.
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