Despacho Postal Guidelines

It has been just over a month since the Brazilian national postal service, Correios, started charging BRL 15 as “Despacho Postal” for any parcel shipped internationally to Brazil. We have already explained how the charge works and what type of parcels are subject to payment. Since the Despacho Postal came into force, many consumers and merchants identified that, regardless of Correios official position about the universality of the charge, many parcels are being released without the need to pay the BRL 15 fee.

Some merchants and the vast majority of consumers purchasing cross-border took to the internet to understand what is true and what is not about the Despacho Postal. Some merchants have opted to track the shipments themselves and pay the fee whenever necessary, to keep consumers from giving up on their purchases. In order to do so, they generally increase the products price to cover the associated costs.

Most of the international businesses selling to Brazil, or local merchants working with dropshipping, however, do not have the necessary resources to manually track all the shipments. Therefore, their buyers are the ones who must track the parcels and pay the Despacho Postal when they are processed by Correios upon arrival in the country.

The concept of Despacho Postal has been difficult to understand for some consumers. For instance, those used to buying low-value products from Chinese websites, such as AliExpress, cannot understand why they have to pay BRL 15 for something bought for as low as USD 2. However, the reality is that Correios has extended this charge, previously applied only to taxed parcels, to all international parcels precisely because of the increased volume of parcels arriving in Brazil each day, made up mostly by small value objects shipped from China.

Brazilian consumers have been very active on internet forums and particularly on Twitter about the Despacho Postal. The hashtag #naoehsopelos15 became quite popular. After a few days, however, it was possible to find testimonies from consumers guaranteeing their parcels were delivered without any charge. Muambator, a popular parcel tracking service in Brazil, also noticed the trend and decided to dig further. Below we will present the results they found in their research.

 

Despacho Postal: Is it a Universal Charge?

In order to identify if the Despacho Postal is indeed being charged for all international parcels, Muambator has analyzed the shipments tracked through their system following these criteria, among others:

•    That came from abroad;

•    That arrived in Brazil from 27^th August 2018 at midnight;

•    Parcels were classified accordingly to the country of origin and the first two letters of the tracking code, which indicate the parcel type/category.

The results were presented as a table. This is how people can use the table to predict the odds of having a parcel charged:

Taking the tracking code LZ522873349CNas a reference, we can see it starts with LZ and ends in CN. These are the source characters for their table with the results. “CN” inform where the parcel is coming from. “LZ”, on the other hand, indicate the parcel type/category, such as First Class Mail, ePacket, Priority Mail, etc.

Therefore, in the table below, the first column will have the last two letters of the tracking code. Under the second column, are listed the parcel type/category. Finally, the third column informs the percentage of parcels analyzed that had the Despacho Postal charged.

 

 

Despacho Postal Charge in a Nutshell

After analyzing the parcels, Muambator drew a few conclusions:

•    Pretty much any parcel starting in “R” will be charged the Despacho Postal.

•    Parcels coming from the USA are not being charged – except for those that fall under the above point.

•    Taking into account only the parcels tracked on Muambator’s system, in the first month, Correios has raised BRL 665,760.00 with the Despacho Postal.

We will continue checking what the word is out there about the Despacho Postal and once we have new information we will be sharing it here. Please contact the Correios support channels if you have any questions or comments.