Europe's Posts Build e-Commerce Services

Ben Vickers, the Wall Street Journal: “Europe’s post offices are trying to leverage their mail-delivery and other services to make a mark on the Internet. With their combination of delivery networks and banking services, post offices across Europe are uniquely positioned to be key e-commerce players. And many are moving to add Internet-based services, including online-payment systems and free e-mail accounts, as well as online parcel- and letter-tracking services and e-commerce Web hosting.” Vickers describes several e-Commerce offerings: Poste Italiane SpA’s eBoost (www.eboost.com) e-commerce service also offers billing, payment and warehousing services, as well as delivery, returns and banking services. Web surfers in Switzerland can do their week’s shopping at online supermarket leShop.ch (www.leshop.com), pay for it directly from their post-office account, and receive the goods within 24 hours anywhere in Switzerland from their regular postman. In Germany, Deutsche Post AG’s e-commerce portal, eVita.de (www.evita.de), hosts more than 150 e-commerce sites. Payment can be made through various means, including direct transfer from a post-office account. One of the main attractions of the site is the consumer advice it contains: It has 10,000 product tests gleaned from various sources and more than 1,000 product guides. The article states, “Many European post offices — Interposta in Italy and Maileva in France, for example — also are using the Internet to cut the costs of bulk mailings, with what is being called hybrid mail. Clients can e-mail brochures, leaflets or letters intended for bulk-mailing to the post office, which then uses an automated process to print them, insert them in envelopes, apply postage and put them in the local regular post, thus holding down mailing costs. Private delivery services and e-commerce support firms may have a hard time matching the post-office services and prices, as the government-owned monopolies attempt to consolidate their advantage in the home-deliveries market and gear up for the further liberalization of postal services in Europe in 2003.”