earthfriendly wrote:How good is the tracking using USPS. Are you able to track it all the way till it reaches its destination in SG?
Yup. Once it arrives in Singapore's mail stream you can also track it at SingPost's Web site. The U.S. Postal Service is getting the same data at that point.
The issue with international mail is that it involves two parties (each country's national mail).
Two or more, but that's not a unique characteristic of postal services. The postal services tend to do better with customs clearance, another part of the equation (and another part of government, but the same government). The couriers don't get to bypass customs.
If something should go awry, they may deflect and point finger towards the other party.
Also not unique to national postal services. And did you know that UPS and Fedex in the United States routinely rely on the U.S. Postal Service for "last mile" delivery? That's also true in some other countries. They just inject the piece into the local mail stream if it's not an address they serve, and they don't serve many addresses in the U.S. (in overall percentage terms -- it's still a very rural country). It's best to think of the couriers as shipment integrators, and they do a good job of that (for a price).
Another advantage the postal services in many countries have (in the U.S., certainly) is that they're the only services legally allowed to deliver to post boxes. UPS and Fedex cannot put anything
through a U.S. mail slot or
into a U.S. mailbox, not even a delivery notice. Not legally, anyway.
What you buy from a courier is
speed, and sometimes you need that.(*) Statistically, at least with these two countries, you don't buy reliability, which is the requirement in this case.
(*) As an example, if you're sending something to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service from overseas, then the IRS accepts proof of private courier acceptance for shipment --
for specific published couriers and classes of service -- as proof of shipment, with the date of shipment deemed the official date of receipt at the IRS. So let's suppose you're Singapore Airlines, and you owe $1 million in U.S. tax. If you send that payment as a paper check using one of the IRS's published couriers and classes of service, then the IRS treats that payment as having been made on the date of shipment. There's some interest on big amounts of money -- some time value to money -- and in such cases speed is important. U.S. Postal Service First Class Mail domestically within the United States is also treated the same way by the IRS (date of shipment acceptance is what counts, i.e. the postmark date), but from overseas you need to use one of the couriers and classes of service on their list if you want to satisfy a filing deadline or payment deadline based on the date of shipment acceptance.
. But thank you. It is quite country specific then? Seems that SG-USA national postal integration is pretty good. It is happening a lot. A shipment would start off with a courier and then the local post office end up delivering it to my house. More efficient and cost-effective for the courier?
. So far, I only had one lost mail batch. In over two decades. So it is worth taking the chance?
