Before the pandemic, regional and other carriers that sometimes rely on the Postal Service for last-mile deliveries made up 6% to 7% of the parcel market, according to data from ShipMatrix Inc., a parcel analytics firm. Now it is around 8% to 9%, according to ShipMatrix, as carriers say they picked up substantial volumes from shippers who told them UPS and FedEx had insufficient capacity during the pandemic. Each percentage point gain in market share for a smaller carrier equates to a more than 15% jump in volumes, ShipMatrix says.
Outside the US, most B2C ecommerce goes with regional carriers anyway as FedEx/UPS are too expensive. This increases the need to consider integrating a carrier management system (several SaaS products available) to allow flexibility in choice by destination while creating accurate delivery promises (with some rate shopping).
The nearest equivalent to FedEx in Europe for B2C is Deutsche Post’s DHL unit; depending on service/destination DHL will either take the parcel end to end themselves (using one of their cheaper ground subsidiaries potentially) or will hand off to destination postal carrier.
Several of the bigger postal administrations of Europe operate supra-national (regional) parcel networks, e.g.
- La Poste (France), trading with several brands such as DPD (grouped through Geopost entity)
- Royal Mail (UK), trading with several brands such as Golden State (grouped through GLS entity) and their uk brand, Parcelforce
And one bigger regional independent is Hermes (Evri in the UK), which is owned by long standing catalogue based retailer Otto of Germany. (Historically catalogue operators in Europe needed to set up their own parcels businesses to trade effectively, Yodel in the UK is a successor to a similar situation but is now independent, Amazon is following that well trodden path with their own parcel logistics in select European countries)