How Postal Ensured Positive Customer Experiences Worldwide

Postal's gifting platform depends on one thing above all: a recipient never pays a surprise fee to receive their gift. Postal found FlavorCloud through its ShipBob partnership, and FlavorCloud's guaranteed DDP and landed cost engine locked in duties and fees at checkout, so nothing arrived as a bill at the door. Since partnering, Postal has grown its client base 400%, with nearly half that volume international, alongside a 166% jump in customer retention.  

Postal is an intelligent gifting platform that helps companies build authentic connections through corporate gifting and swag, sent to prospects, customers, partners, and employees around the world. 

A gift that arrives with a surprise bill isn't much of a gift.

Postal's whole business depends on one moment: the recipient opening their gift. If that recipient gets hit with duties or taxes on delivery, the gesture backfires before it lands. Before FlavorCloud, Postal was managing that risk with standard international carriers and Direct Plant Shipment services, and it fell on their own small team to coordinate with last-mile carriers in each country and make sure recipients weren't stuck with a bill. Delays at customs made it worse, since Postal's clients often needed large-scale swag shipments to arrive on time for conferences and events, and a hold, or an outright refusal, at the border could cost them the moment entirely. 

"It's crucial that recipients have positive experiences and don't have to pay taxes on the gift they receive," said Alex Park, Logistics and Warehousing Manager at Postal. "A gift should surprise and delight, and FlavorCloud allowed us to do that." 

One integration solved duties, delays, and refusals.

Postal found FlavorCloud through its ShipBob partnership, and cost transparency sealed it. The immediate draw was seeing the full cost upfront at checkout: FlavorCloud's landed cost engine put duties, taxes, and fees in front of the shopper through guaranteed Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) shipping, so Postal never had to worry about a recipient seeing a bill after the fact. That same DDP structure handled last-mile carrier coordination and customs clearance directly, taking both off Postal's plate.

Refusals at the border came down to one thing: accurate HS classification. FlavorCloud's classification engine assigns the correct HS code to every item, which is also what makes the landed cost estimate accurate in the first place. Get the code wrong and the cost estimate breaks along with it. Get it right, and shipments clear without getting stuck.

"FlavorCloud drives great value because our customers are able to send gifts to their recipients without worrying about duties, taxes, VAT, GST or anything else," Park said. "A lot of our competitors didn't offer DDP in the beginning, which gave us a competitive edge."

Even integrated through ShipBob, Postal got direct access to FlavorCloud's own team, including time with FlavorCloud's Director of Global Trade Compliance to work through border-crossing risk before it became a delay.

400% client growth, and international now makes up half the business. 

• 400% increase in client base 
• Nearly 50% of that volume now international

• 166% increase in international customer retention

• 15% increase in shipment volume

Postal was named one of FlavorCloud's Top Cross Border Shippers of 2023, a reflection of how much of that growth came from expanding confidently across borders instead of avoiding them. 

"At Postal, we empower marketing, sales, customer success, and HR teams to incorporate gifting as part of their offline strategy, and we won't let the recipient's location get in the way of their gifting efforts," said Shannon Leiner, VP of Merchandising and Operations at Postal.

The compliance engine is clearing the path into B2B. 

Postal and FlavorCloud are now extending the partnership into the B2B sector, with FlavorCloud's compliance engine doing the same groundwork on customs and classification that made D2C gifting reliable in the first place. The ShipBob integration stays at the front door, but the relationship has grown well past it.