• SAPO will promote Wish’s Every Day is Black Friday campaign across its social media channels.
• This builds off of a partnership established between the pair in 2021.
• With both of these entities being controversial in their own right we urge our readers to exercise caution when shopping on Wish locally.

Well, now this is a collaboration we never thought we’d see. The South African Post Office (SAPO) has announced a partnership with Wish to deliver orders to local shoppers over the course of the ecommerce platform’s Every Day is Black Friday campaign.

The partnership will see SAPO promoting the campaign across its social media channels.

The Post Office has actually been delivering packages from Wish to locals since 2021. Following the establishment of a strategic partnership, the Post Office made it possible for customers to track their order after it was placed right up until it was delivered. Conveniently, local shoppers would also see multiple orders bundled together.

“The South African Post Office is staying relevant to the latest e-commerce trends and has improved its tracking system with the implementation of the international tracking capability for parcels. This empowers customers to track items from dispatch to delivery,” the head of logistics for SAPO at the time, Sekano Kgalanyane said.

Fast forward to the present and SAPO hopes to leverage the SMS system it implemented back into 2021 to get orders to customers in a timely manner. Orders placed through Wish can be tracked via the Post Office’s website or Wish Post.

Now, we can’t mention Wish or SAPO without highlighting the numerous controversies associated with those brands.

For starters, Wish has a reputation of offering up popular items for incredibly, sometimes impossibly, low prices. The website has become the butt of numerous jokes and at times scams. It’s really not hard to find examples of content creators ordering items only to get items that aren’t even remotely close to the item they purchased.

Shop at Wish at your own risk then.

As for the Post Office, well, as any South African can attest to, SAPO is incredibly problematic.

Back in February, SAPO was skirting the boundaries of liquidation but by July the organisation was placed into Business Rescue with Anoosh Rooplal and Juanito Damons as business rescue practitioners.

An investigation published by GroundUp at around the same time, highlighted the numerous failings at SAPO branches including a lack of IT support, infrastructure not working and no backup power to keep offices functioning during loadshedding. Beyond that, one can throw a dart and find somebody who hasn’t received a package from SAPO.

Given the controversies that follow both of these organisations we urge our readers to exercise caution when shopping on Wish this festive season.