How Mail for Business Works – Online Stores and Major Senders

Previously, in order to become a client of the Mail, it was necessary to have special knowledge about its structure: to understand the tariffs and rules, to get through the restrictions that only employees knew about. The conclusion of the contract took two weeks or more. There was no API for integration, all forms were filled out manually. In a word – a dense forest, which business has no time to tear through.

We see the ideal scenario for using Mail: the user clicks on the button and gets the result – the packages go, the items are tracked. Internal processes – distribution by groups of items, the formation of documents and others – occur “under the hood.”

Mail has a solution that helps businesses become more accessible to customers – otpravka.pochta.ru. This is a single point of interaction with the sender, where you can calculate the cost of the service, prepare documents and forms with one click, print labels, track packages, see statistics on the number and type of items, costs, regions and users.

A distributed team from different cities of Russia is working on the Dispatch service: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Omsk and Rostov-on-Don. Our task is to simplify the interaction of business with the Post from the moment of connection to the daily sending of parcels. Now we are working to transfer Sending clients to online interaction, automate internal processes, eliminate errors, work on setting up electronic document management and receiving payments.

In 2019, we released 23 releases, in which more than 100 features were released. New functionality has appeared and will appear every two weeks.
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One-click connection on offer

We analyzed the new contracts for 3 months and realized that almost all of them are standard. This allowed us to switch to accelerated connection under the offer agreement. The offer has the same legal force as a paper contract and it already includes popular services – home delivery, offices, ground or expedited, cash on delivery.

If you need advanced functionality and / or a paper contract, the connection period will increase. You can start with an offer, and later expand the range of services through the manager. Very soon (the release is scheduled for late March), any business will be able to connect to the Sending on offer.

We have already reduced the time to connect to basic services to a few hours, which is better than a few weeks. Reducing this time is not easy, because on the way to using the service there is a human factor and long processes of data exchange between legal systems, but work in this direction is already moving.

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This is how the connection window for sending looks

Integration with various CMS / CRM systems “out of the box”

In addition to the software interface, we provide official modules for popular CMS-platforms, on which the majority of small and medium online stores in the Russian Federation work. Modules allow the store to get integration with us “out of the box” and practically at no additional cost, which greatly reduces the threshold for entering the Mail as a service.

Today we support 1C Bitrix, InSales, amoCRM, ShopScript and are constantly expanding this list to cover all the solutions that are currently on the market in the coming months.

Sending electronic registered letters through your personal account

The service of registered electronic letters has been operating since 2016. Through it, private individuals receive letters and fines from government bodies – the traffic police, the Federal Bailiff Service, and courts.

Registered emails are delivered faster and more reliable. If the user has agreed to accept legally significant correspondence in electronic form, then the letter will come instantly and its opening is legally equivalent to receiving a paper analogue in the post office for signature. In cases where the recipient did not give consent, the letter is printed out in a specialized center and sent in paper form.

Previously, the availability of registered business emails was limited by the fact that there was no simple way to use them, and the sender had to work hard to integrate the service into their processes through the API.

At the end of 2019, we made a convenient interface for registered electronic letters in the sending personal account. Now businesses of any scale will be able to exchange e-mails with government authorities.

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The interface of electronic registered letters in your personal account

Electronic issue of track numbers

The long-awaited innovation for those who have already sent a lot of parcels through the Mail is the transition to the electronic issuance of postal identifiers (track numbers).

Previously, to get a pool of numbers for tracking parcels, you had to contact the department where the range of numbers issued to you was recorded in a notebook. This manual mode worked incorrectly – codes were inevitably lost, confused, doubled, and errors appeared in the service.

Now the process of issuing track numbers is automated. In your personal account, you create a package or upload an .xls file if there are a lot of packages. Each shipment is immediately assigned a code. It also forms the documents necessary for sending, which can be printed on a printer in order to prepare parcels and letters for transfer to the department. By the way, they can be immediately tracked on the website or mobile application of Russian Post.

Delivery of items without papers

When you bring parcels to the Post Office, you fill out form 103, a register of all delivered items. The registry serves as the basis for the closing documentation and confirmation of the acceptance of shipments. One invoice can have both 10 items and 1000, and then you have to deal with a lot of paper.

Now we are engaged in the digitization and legalization of these forms, we strive to ensure that they are executed in electronic form and signed by Electronic Digital Signature (EDS) by both the Post and the sender. Now this functionality works in pilot mode, and we plan to make it publicly available by the end of the first quarter of 2020. As soon as we launch this update to the masses, huge packs of paper will become unnecessary.

Support for fulfillment service in your account

The post office has launched its first fulfillment center based on the logistics center in Vnukovo. Businesses do not have to organize their own warehouse when you can use the storage services of an external provider. Mail becomes such a provider.

It works like this: the store system integrates with the warehouse and orders, bypassing manual processing, are sent to the fulfillment provider and go to work in the warehouse. All steps are closed on the provider: packaging, shipping, processing returns.

Soon we will provide access to the fulfillment service through the interface of your personal account so that everything works transparently, automatically and online.

Facilitation of customs procedures related to export

Previously, when creating an international shipment, a package of necessary documents was formed in the service, including customs declarations CN22 or CN23 – depending on the quantity of goods in the order. Paper declarations were attached to the package together with the label, and the user went into the personal office of the FCS, entered the same information with his hands, signed the declaration with an electronic signature and waited for the decision to issue it in the personal account of the Federal Customs Service. After receiving the release, the items could be carried to the post office.

Now the Russian Post has integration with the FCS, which simplifies the process of submitting and processing documents. If you export goods through the Post, then fill out the forms CN23, CN22 in the personal account of the legal entity in the Sending, and the Post transmits the data to the customs online, which saves the business from making paper declarations. This process speeds up work from all sides – due to the fact that the exchange of data between the Post and customs has been established, the goods do not lie in wait for clearance, do not go through manual processing and they are released much faster.

Usage statistics and development plans

Already, more than 30% of all parcels within the country pass through the dispatch. Every month, 33,000 users use the Dispatch.

We do not stop here and continue to work to simplify access to services and make a single entry point for all the services of Russian Post, remove restrictions and make interaction with us easier and more understandable.

Our main task now is to transfer clients to online interaction: we need to automate internal processes, eliminate errors, learn how to get clean data with correct indexes, spelling addresses, electronic document management and billing. And so that all this does not require the business to understand the internal kitchen of the Post, but to be hidden “under the hood”.

Now you know for yourself and can tell your colleagues and friends who need delivery of goods that working with Mail is not at all scary, but very easy and pleasant.

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