Regulators OK Postal Service’s Ground Advantage product

2-to-5-day delivery product aimed at budget-conscious small to midsize businesses

The Postal Service gets OK to launch Ground Advantage (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

The U.S. Postal Service said Monday that it received approval from the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) of the Postal Service’s plan to launch its Ground Advantage product on July 9.

The U.S. Postal Service earlier this year proposed to merge three ground delivery products into a new brand known as USPS Ground Advantage, which will offer two-to-five-day transit times with pound-based, ounce-based and cubic pricing options for parcels weighing up to 70 pounds.

The three products being merged are First-Class Package Service, targeted at merchants shipping parcels under 1 pound, Parcel Select Ground, targeted at shipments weighing between 1 and 70 pounds, and a new service called Parcel Select Ground Cubic, which sets prices based on the parcel’s cubic dimensions and handles weights between 1 and 70 pounds.

Goods will be shipped across the Postal Service’s massive ground network.

The product is aimed at shippers willing to sacrifice speed for price. It is also intended for users of the Postal Service’s Priority Mail service, who need two-to-three-day transit times but don’t want to pay Priority Mail’s pound-based prices.

The Postal Service earlier had said it planned to unveil the offering after it was approved by the PRC, the independent agency that must sign off on product rollouts and pricing changes, among other duties.

Pricing for USPS Ground Advantage will reflect a decrease of 1.4% relative to predecessor shipping products offered by the Postal Service.

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Mark Solomon

Formerly the Executive Editor at DC Velocity, Mark Solomon joined FreightWaves as Managing Editor of Freight Markets. Solomon began his journalistic career in 1982 at Traffic World magazine, ran his own public relations firm (Media Based Solutions) from 1994 to 2008, and has been at DC Velocity since then. Over the course of his career, Solomon has covered nearly the whole gamut of the transportation and logistics industry, including trucking, railroads, maritime, 3PLs, and regulatory issues. Solomon witnessed and narrated the rise of Amazon and XPO Logistics and the shift of the U.S. Postal Service from a mail-focused service to parcel, as well as the exponential, e-commerce-driven growth of warehouse square footage and omnichannel fulfillment.