While PostEurop spends its lobbying efforts arguing the parcel market is “already competitive,” the real competitive battle has quietly moved up a layer, to platforms such as Sendcloud, nShift, Packlink, Parcel International and Seven Senders.
These platforms now sit between the merchant and the carrier, holding the rate comparisons, the routing rules, the tracking data, and increasingly, the customer relationship itself. Carriers are becoming a commoditized layer underneath someone else’s interface. That should worry incumbents more than any Delivery Act.
For years, multi-carrier platforms sold themselves as carrier-friendly infrastructure: more volume, easier integration, painless customs compliance since the EU scrapped the €150 de minimis threshold this summer. True enough. But infrastructure that aggregates volume also aggregates leverage. When a merchant’s shipping decision runs through nShift’s 1,000-carrier routing engine rather than a direct relationship, the carrier isn’t competing for the customer anymore. It’s competing for a slot in someone else’s algorithm. Seven Senders has gone further still, injecting parcels directly into local last-mile networks as a “virtual carrier.” That’s not software support. That’s disintermediation with a friendly UX.
Here’s the uncomfortable question nobody in the sector wants to ask out loud: who owns cross-carrier delivery-performance data, and why isn’t it public?
These platforms already sit on exactly the dataset that could resolve the argument PostEurop is trying to win by press release — real, comparative, carrier-by-carrier delivery success rates, not self-reported figures massaged for a commissioned study. If nShift or Sendcloud can route a parcel based on live carrier performance, regulators and consumers can benchmark on the same data. The infrastructure for accountability already exists. It’s just being used for procurement optimization instead of market transparency.
This is where I part ways with both sides of the current debate. PostEurop wants no sector-specific rules because self-reported data says the market works. Consumer advocates want blunt delivery-quality targets. Both miss what’s actually happened: the market has already been re-architected by intermediary platforms, and regulation hasn’t caught up to where the leverage now sits.
If the EU is serious about a Delivery Act, it shouldn’t just set quality targets for carriers. It should mandate that the platforms already aggregating performance data make it portable, standardized, and visible. Open data obligations on multi-carrier platforms would do more for consumer accountability than any USO-style rulebook aimed at PostNL or DHL alone. It would also be a natural extension of the case for open, white-label locker networks: if lockers need interoperability and transparency, so does the software layer now deciding which carrier gets your parcel in the first place.
Carriers spent a decade competing on price. They’re about to find out they were competing for shelf space in someone else’s app.
Walther Ploos van Amstel.
Also read: PostEurop: The EU Parcel Market Is Already Competitive. So Why Regulate It?