Nigeria, U.S. postal services eye e-commerce to offset declining mail business

Nigeria and the United States postal services are targeting e-commerce as a way of salvaging their declining mail business.

The post master general of Nigeria Postal Service (NIPOST) Malam Ibrahim Bori Baba disclosed this in Abuja at the agency’s Service Award.

He said the postal service would soon partner some of the online retail companies to boost its services.

Baba said the advances in Information and Communications Technology did not threaten the existence of NIPOST.

He said ICT has brought about efficiency and improvement in service delivery by NIPOST.

“We are working out the possibilities of partnering with some e-commerce companies to provide value added services to the customers,” he said.

With further drops in its traditional bread-and-butter products ahead, the U.S. Postal Service wants to capitalise on e-commerce, said Nagisa Manabe, who joined the USPS in May 2012 as chief marketing and sales officer from Coca-Cola Co after a career in the private sector.

Over the past two years the USPS has rolled out real-time scanning for packages, a vital tool for online retailers and consumers alike to track their packages. It would also upgrade all of its delivery workers’ handheld scanners.

The rise of the Internet has taken a heavy toll on first-class mail, the USPS’s most profitable product. That falling business played a significant role in the USPS’s fiscal 2014 loss of $5.5 billion, its eighth consecutive year in the red.

From 2009 to 2013, the volume of first-class mail deliveries dropped more than 20 percent. In the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, USPS deliveries declined to 155.4 billion pieces from 158.2 billion. First-class deliveries accounted for 2.2 billion pieces of that decline.