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Shipping Packages with the Canada Post Mobile app
Canada Post's bread and butter is shipipng packages across the country for businesses and for every day consumers. It's the foundation of our utility for customers and the number one revenue driver for the business and yet, for half a million Canadians that prefer to use our mobile app every month, it's not available. That was until June of this year (2026).
Shipping
Packages
with the
Canada Post
Mobile
app
Canada Post's bread and butter is shipipng packages across the country for businesses and for every day consumers. It's the foundation of our utility for customers and the number one revenue driver for the business and yet, for half a million Canadians that prefer to use our mobile app every month, it's not available. That was until June of this year (2026).
The Straw the Camel is Carrying
Our challenge was to understand how people felt about the existing experience on the web page and produce something built on those learnings and leapfrogged some of the pain points and structural constraints that customers were plagued by previously.
Unexpected costs
Throughout our research we heard that people struggled with confidence around measuring the size, and especially the weight, of their items that they planned to ship when using the existing shipping tool on the web. There was an inate fear that they might mismeasure and receive additional charges on their credit card after the fact. Understandable.Printing
It turns out people don't have printers anymore, and when they do, they often don't have the ink required for printing. Understandable.Session expiry
Our shipping labels require quite a lot of information, especially when shipping internationally: addresses, phone numbers, emails, dimensions, declarations etc. We learned that people often didn't complete the forms all in one go, but the existing web experience didn't allow for intermittent or partial completion. Understandable.Dead ends
The shipping label is the central artefact that enables someone to move a package from one place to another with Canada Post, but there are various ways that people tend to start that form: Some start by exploring shipping rates, others begin with a customs form, some jump right in to the direct form-builder itself. Only the latter option gets you all the way to a completed shipping label though and we heard customers speaking to that. There exists a lack of continuity from the alternate starting points (shipping rates and customs forms) that causes frustration on the web experience. Understandable!All of these slight frustrations add up. By nailing the usability, leveraging handy iOS and Android OS technologies, and by connecting the ancillary shipping tools directly to the main tool we believed we could improve the existing experience and start driving meaningful revenue from shipping label creation through the native app.
Key Design Decisions
Reduce redundancy by connecting ancillary flows
Because of the various ways you can start the shipping process it's important to maintain the data that's submitted throughout any flow as you move into the central and final part of the main flow. Prior to this project, if you had started with the shipping rates tool, or the customs form builder, you would need to start from scratch in the shipping tool and end up submitting a lot of duplicate information. What we proposed is carrying all of the relevant information from the standalone tools over into the main shipping label flow when the user is ready — eliminating any need for duplicate inputs.
Enable partial forms by introducing drafts
As a principle, focusing on enabling drafts in all of our tools and services at Canada Post is a core piece of ensuring approachability and flexibility. We applied the same design approach here with this tool by allowing people to pause the flow at any point if they are interrupted or need to take a break for whatever reason. Whether it's an hour, a day, or a week, the user is able to come back and pick right up where they left off.
Ease intimidation around size and weight
Build a friendly scale and preset suggestions to help people get over that hurdle around their size and weight anxiety. By using familiar examples like household items, we can ensure that people feel more confidence around estimating size and weight quickly and confidently.
Centralize QR codes
No more arriving at the post office and scouring through your email or photos app for your shipping label QR codes. With this project we were able to bring that functionality into the app, on top of adding them to your OS wallet.
The Result?
We've seen a significant adoption of the native app shipping label tool with thousands of labels created, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue generated in the first 3 months. The biggest surprise for myself was how many people are using it for creating multiple shipping labels, with the single most used account creating 45 shipping labels up to this point, just three-and-a-half months in. These have been great signals going forward and give us some surprising clues as to where to focus our resources going forward.
Thank you for reading.
Nat Green
Thanks for stopping by.
Care to chat? Please reach out at
timomarigreen@gmail.com
