MaltaPost service opens UK ecommerce to Maltese shoppers

MaltaPost has launched a new forwarding service to help online shoppers purchase goods abroad. The postal operator said shoppers in the Mediterranean island country were often disappointed when attempting to purchase items from foreign websites, with merchants refusing to deliver to Malta.

Starting with the UK, the new “SendOn” service will see registered users able to ship online purchases to an address within a foreign country, for MaltaPost to then ship back to the purchaser’s Malta address.

The island’s designated universal postal provider, which is majority-owned by the Lombard Bank, said its customers would be able to take advantage of competitive shipping rates offered for domestic UK consumers to ship items to the MaltaPost location, including potentially free shipping rates to that address.

They would then pay only the MaltaPost shipping rate to get the item back to Malta, rather than a potentially “prohibitive” total shipping rate offered by those web merchants that do ship to Malta.

MaltaPost said the new service would “revolutionise” online shopping in Malta.

“With this new forwarding service, MaltaPost is broadening the opportunities of online shopping,” said the MaltaPost CEO, Joseph Gafa. “With a huge network of post offices, an extensive delivery fleet and a dedicated team of delivery specialists, we offer flexible solutions and quality delivery services.”

SendOn

The new SendOn service requires users to register on the MaltaPost website to receive a unique ID to use with the UK delivery address provided. They can then shop at any UK ecommerce website, providing the ID along with their name and the SendOn UK address when providing a merchant with shipping delivery information.

MaltaPost said it should take around a week to deliver ordered items back to Malta addresses. When items are shipped to Malta, the Post will send out an email to recipients with a delivery date and total cost of payment for forwarding the item.

Malta has its postal market fully opened to competition from the start of next year, but already allows competition for parcel services and mail other than letters under 50g in weight.

While MaltaPost is currently seeing continued declines in its traditional mail volumes, in line with postal markets in the rest of the world, it has been seeing increased weight of cross-border shipments thanks to ecommerce.