The international standard for identifying postal items
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#2With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of tracking numbers.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#3With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
You could hate it by an internal metric, like date received.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#4With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
What helps is that they don’t ship direct from China by mail much. They often send in bulk to the destination country and then mail locally, and local post systems can have their own domestic format.
Or they have their own private courier do the last mile delivery too so it never touches any postal operator.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#5With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
What helps is that they don’t ship direct from China by mail much. They often send in bulk to the destination country and then mail locally, and local post systems can have their own domestic format. Or they have their own private courier do the last mile delivery too so it never touches any postal operator.
Do they? In Australia usually get them direct from HK or China because it is cheaper to do that even than post it within Australia!
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#6With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
Service type and serial need to be unique. Countries control what that 2letter field means. There is no rule against multiple codes indicating the same service. So AA through AZ would give you 260,000,000 unique combinations that you shouldn’t reuse for 1 year. Rinse, later and repeat if you need more.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#7With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
And I wonder what was the constraint to not make it longer when they developed the standard. Making it a few digits more seem it wouldn't cost much.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#8With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
Yeah. Apparently last year they shipped over two million small parcels to Finland (pop. 5.6M) alone, which is completely bollocks.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#9With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
And I wonder what was the constraint to not make it longer when they developed the standard. Making it a few digits more seem it wouldn't cost much.
The cost will be in updating every legacy postal system that currently has fixed column lengths/input field length limits.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#10With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
Even the US must easily run into this constraint.