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Introducing
Home Pickup
at Canada
Post
Time and again we hear customers say that they appreciate how close the post office is whenever they need to ship a package or make a return. Our customers appreciate convenience. That's why we've taken steps to ensure that Canadians always have convenient shipping options at their finger tips. It began with something called "Self Scan" and, to add to those options, for 2026 we've introduced Home Pickup.
Introducing
Home
Pickup
at
Canada
Post
Time and again we hear customers say that they appreciate how close the post office is whenever they need to ship a package or make a return. Our customers appreciate convenience. That's why we've taken steps to ensure that Canadians always have convenient shipping options at their finger tips. It began with something called "Self Scan" and, to add to those options, for 2026 we've introduced Home Pickup.
Our Convenience Conundrum
Despite the appreciation for our dense post office network, our personal and work schedules don't always allow the time for us to actually get there. Without the option for pickup this often leads to folks delaying and even abandoning their shipments, or worse, seeking out one of Canada Post's direct competitors for better-suited options.
Some of the best companies in the world directly compete with us around shipping and tracking, and so our customers expect a certain breadth and standard when using these tools. For them, trust and confidence sit right up there with convenience. We believed that if we could nail those 3 pillars that it would make shipping more approachable for Canadians, driving packages shipped, satisfying the needs of everyday consumers and opening a new channel for small businesses and micro businesses from within the Canada Post mobile app.
Key Design Decisions
By designing something that was easy to use, approachable and unintimidating, I hoped that we would overcome common shipping snags that we know tend to scare our users within the traditional shipping process. I'll walk through a couple ways of how we did that below.
Persistent view of all order information
In mobile design we tend to default to progressive disclosure, but when submitting forms that require various details that all relate to a single item, we've discovered the need for people to be able to quickly jump back and forth between steps. In the spirit of those aforementioned pillars, we landed on a hybrid view that persisted the details submitted for each previous step within view from front to back.
Friendly package details input
People fear punishment when shipping packages because they think that shipping companies are strict with how much items cost at various sizes and weights. They don't want to be upcharged later. The truth is that we have ranges in which breakpoints trigger price changes. We surfaced those ranges as best we could to imply that exact specs were not necessary.
Enable draft orders
Measuring size and weights of items often require using multiple apps or comparing services. With this in mind we wanted to ensure that people could pop out of their pickup mid-flow and come back when time allowed.
The Result?
A new bar set for ease of use at Canada Post tackling the most persistent user complaint in our most important tool and revenue generator. In our pilot locations we've had a positive reception to the feature triggering a follow-on phase for the project. Operationally, it's a challenge and we have some feedback that we're designing around for phase 2, but the positive signals have at least pointed us in the right direction.
Thank you for reading.
Nat Green
Thanks for stopping by.
Care to chat? Please reach out at
timomarigreen@gmail.com
