New postal amendment - what impact will it have?
From 1st January 2025, transport service providers and their customers will be obliged to label national and international shipments with increased weight. This is intended to ensure that all health and safety regulations are met when transporting consignments.
The following article provides a comprehensive overview of the new postal amendment:
1. what does the new postal amendment mean?
2. which transport service providers are affected?
3. labelling changes with Mercoline in the Mercoline solution M.TransportCommunicator
1. What does the new postal amendment mean?
The German government's postal amendment, which came into force on 19th July 2024, continues to ensure a nationwide and affordable basic supply of letters and parcels in Germany. The new law promotes fair competition and ensures that working conditions in the parcel sector are improved. Heavy parcels (20 kg or more) may now only be delivered by two deliverers or with technical support. We would like to inform you that from 1st January 2025, it will be mandatory for transport service providers and their customers to label national and international shipments with increased weight. This will require adjustments to the label. Further information on the postal amendment can be found here.
2. Which transport service providers are affected?
The postal amendment affects all parcel service providers that send parcels within Germany. The necessary adjustments for the service providers DHL Paket and DPD are already included in the last major release M.TC 2410.100.
Further adjustments for the transport service providers Trans-o-flex, UPS, TNT, General Overnight! and NOX Nachtexpress will be provided with the next feature pack M.TC 2410.110. The release is scheduled for mid-November.
The transport service providers FedEx, DHL Express and GLS can continue to be used in our M.TransportCommunicator product without any changes, as the labels are generated directly online using the service providers' web APIs.
3. Label changes in the Mercoline solution M.TransportCommunicator
Please note that the adjustments already included for the postal amendment in Major Release 2410.100 and Feature Pack 2410.110 should be installed by 1 January 2025. We will inform our customers in good time about the availability of the corresponding software version. If it is not possible to install the release by this date, please contact produktsupport@mercoline.de.