The SA Post Office lost the parcel war
Sending a parcel with a private courier in South Africa is cheaper, faster, and more customer-friendly than using the South African Post Office, according to a recent MyBroadband test.
The Post Office recently lost its disputed monopoly on delivering small parcels in South Africa. It had been granted a 25-year exclusivity period, which ran from April 2000 until April 2025.
Communications minister Solly Malatsi had announced in March that he intended to review the Post Office’s exclusivity on reserved postal services.
To do this, he invited interested parties to submit their views on the subject. Some argued that couriers should pay the Post Office an “agency fee” to be permitted to deliver small parcels.
However, after considering the feedback, Malatsi ultimately decided to revoke the SA Post Office’s exclusivity on small parcels, announcing the change in the Government Gazette on 12 December 2025.
MyBroadband’s test revealed precisely why the Post Office lost the battle against private couriers.
In mid-December, we sent two parcels from Centurion to Gqeberha: one with the Post Office and one using a The Courier Guy locker.
We kept the test as fair as possible, so the Post Office parcel was sent using registered mail, which allowed us to track it.
Even though we can address the parcel directly to the recipient’s home or business, it ends up at a local Post Office and must be collected.
Therefore, we used The Courier Guy’s locker service, previously called Pudo, to send the other parcel.
This creates a like-for-like comparison between the services. Both offer online tracking, both need to be handed in at a specific location, and both require the recipient to collect them from a designated point.
The Courier Guy allowed us to enter all the details of our parcel online and print out a waybill to attach to the package.
We could also write these details on the parcel if we didn’t have access to a printer, but the printed waybill makes things neater.
Payment is made online, and then the parcel can be dropped off at any one of over 1,400 lockers nationwide. Sending a parcel in a medium locker costs R69.
Sending a parcel with the Post Office was a similar process. However, we were required to write the address on the parcel ourselves, as they only provide a tracking number sticker.
There are also only 554 active Post Office branches left in South Africa and the delivery cost R84.10, nearly 22% more than The Courier Guy.
Race between Post Office and The Courier Guy
Both packages were sent on the afternoon of 11 December 2025, and the tracking for both was active later that same afternoon.
According to the tracking, the courier parcel was collected from the locker only a few hours after being deposited, scanned through the Pretoria hub, and was in transit to its destination the same evening.
The Post Office parcel only left the branch the next afternoon, while the courier parcel arrived in Gqeberha that evening.
The next morning, the courier parcel was delivered to the locker in Gqeberha, and the recipient was notified, allowing them to collect it. Overall, The Courier Guy delivered the package in under two days.
Meanwhile, the Post Office parcel has finally been scanned into the Tshwane Mail Centre, an entire week after being sent, and is nowhere near being delivered.
Overall, while the sending experience is very similar between the two options, using a private courier is cheaper, faster, and has significantly more locations, making it the clear choice for consumers.
| Performance metric | Post Office | Private courier (TCG) |
|---|---|---|
| Price | R84.10 | R69 |
| Locations / lockers | 554 | 1,400+ |
| Parcel arrival date | 30 December 2025 | 13 December 2025 |
| Time to delivery | 19 days | 2 days |
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