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@heiner2929 wrote:

Yes iamanark.....Can anyone explain to me the actual 'agreement' in place for mail delivery from overseas.

 

I have read a few posts in the past along the lines of......how ludicrous that Auspost is missing out on revenue when delivering overseas parcels to an address in Australia for less than it costs to mail something within Aus

Same plane / truck / fuel / sorter / postie ?????  ....but have never quite understood the reasoning.

 

 

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I'll try . . . . . in simple terms, countries that are party to the Universal Postal Union Agreement will deliver postal items that land on their shores without charging anything for delivering the items.  All monies collected for the posting of items internationally will remain with the country that the item is sent from.

Each year there is a meeting where some "equalisation" of costs are made, but invariably Australia does not get adequate recompense for delivering mail that lands here from overseas.

The original agreement was struck back in 1874 when the amount of inbound mail probably equalled the amount of outgoing mail for most countries i.e. not very much.  The advent of online trading has seen the costs to some countries becoming very unbalanced, especially for Australia where we have no 'land borders' with any other country.

China Post has really low international posting rates, which allows Chinese sellers to offer free postage to buyers from Australia (and probably everywhere else as well).  This low postage rate allows China to encourage their businesses to sell internationally and thus improve their balance of trade though exporting so much stuff.

As an example of this, I recently bought two phone covers from China (for an outdated phone), and each one cost me $2.37 with free postage.  There is no way that any seller in Australia can compete with this (not that I could find any seller selling a cover for this model of phone).  The postage within Australia alone would probably have been more than I paid in total, yet Aust Post delivered the covers to me.

The equivalent situation would be where Aust Post was to offer posting to the UK for a matter of less than a dollar, and then once the item arrives in the UK then Royal Mail are obliged to deliver it no matter how much it costs them.  However, in this scenario, Aust Post would only get less than a dollar, whereas by charging a realistic rate for posting to the UK they get to keep all of the postage charged.