IPC logs 2 million returned items
The International Post Corporation (IPC) Common Return Platform has reached 2 million returned items at the end of the third quarter 2015. Five years ago, IPC created the IPC Easy Return Solution together with five European posts. Since then, the solution has evolved due to market needs and now supports several international mail networks – EPG, KPG, PRIME, INTERCONNECT and UPU parcels – under the IPC Common Return Platform (CRP), which was launched two years ago.
In September 2015, over 215,000 labels were created by the returns solution – on par with the yearly average for the first four years of the solution. Moreover, the number of items returned during first three quarters of 2015 (891,278) almost equalled the number of items returned during the previous four years (1,109,245).
The Common Return Platform provides a return service enabling postal operators to collaborate on returning cross-border parcels to e-retailers. In simple terms, it allows e-customers in country A to return goods to e-sellers in country B. The service allows authorised returns to be accepted at postal counters without payment, and then returned through the postal network to the e-seller which authorised the return.
The e-seller provides the e-customer with a postage-paid return label. All the e-customer needs to do is to drop the unwanted purchase at a post office or indicated facility together with the dedicated label provided by the e-seller attached to the parcel. The labels are generated by IPC in a direct interface with authorising posts using the Common Return Platform.
About half of the labels created by the platform end up in a real item being returned, as some e-sellers include return labels together with the original shipment just in case their customers want to make a return.
The service has grown from the five original participating posts – bpost, Deutsche Post DHL, Le Groupe La Poste, Royal Mail Group and PostNL – to ten authorising posts and around 30 accepting posts in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America.
