Snail mail has gone high-tech - you can now track your parcel via an app on your phone.
And that’s not all, says SA Post Office chief information officer Mthoko Mncwabe - the app uses satellite navigation to show you all the post offices within a 10km radius of your home, and reveals at which ones you can renew your motor vehicle licence.
Called 'South African Post Office', the app - available free on the Google Playstore for Android devices and on the iStore for Apple devices - tracks and traces both South African and international parcels via the allocated tracking numbers.
Scanning the barcode of the track-and-trace label will reveal where the parcel was dispatched from, where it was scanned en route and the name of the person who collected it.
Now that’s a smart innovation many South Africans could have done with a while back when a protracted Post Office strike played havoc with parcel delivery.
“Reliability and convenience are requirements for customers in the 21 century," said Mncwabe. “As SA Post Office, we have adopted the use of technology to enhance our customers’ experience.”
*If you have friends or family overseas who are likely to post a gift to you or your loved ones, it’s worth warning them that if the gift’s declared value is more than the equivalent of R400, you’ll end up having to pay customs duty before you can get your hands on it.
Incredibly, that’s been SARS’s gift ceiling amount since 1993, despite the fact that the value of Rand has plummeted in the intervening years.
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