Post in Northern Sweden

This describes the postal experience in northern Sweden for the major post companies and compares to experiences in the UK. The information is intended for people in the UK wondering how everything works in Sweden.

General Rules

Typically there is a standalone postbox outside the property and the postbox should have the name on it for the house occupants. Where there is a remote collection of houses, their postboxes might be grouped together on a wooden board. This is similar to north America but different to the UK where post is typically via a hole for letters in the front door.

Murphys law: Deciding to finally buy a brand new postbox to replace your rusty bent one will cause a delivery driver to reverse into it within weeks. It will then look bent and rusty but no driver will ever reverse into it again.

At a Glance:

• Put your name on your postbox, and avoid using any alias.
• Fix the postbox if it’s falling over or leaning
• Install the PostNord app and the “mina packet” app and add your email and phone number to each
• Get a Swedish mobile phone number if you haven’t already, and add it to the apps
• Don’t run out to the delivery driver when they pull into your drive, unless they ask for you.
• Keep your driveway clear of snow in winter
• Try to avoid receiving any time-sensitive post from the UK
• I recommend DB Schenker, UPS, and DHL Express when you get the choice

Post Collection Points

There is also the option to have a postbox at locations, such as the local food store or hardware shop. When buying online, parcels are typically cheaper if delivered to a collection point. Collection is done by showing ID or authenticating in the relevant delivery company app with Bank ID.

Don’t Bug the Delivery Driver

In the UK, if a delivery driver appears in the driveway it can be important to run out to collect the parcel. They are on a strict time schedule. The risk is that they’ll leave a note that they attempted delivery and take the parcel to a depo many kilometers away.

In contrast, in Sweden the delivery driver wants to deliver their parcel and be left alone without human contact if possible. If they have to ask for ID they will ring the doorbell and generally do the right thing.

Avoid Nicknames

Having mail delivered to an alias or nickname is going to cause problems and might result in you being unable to pickup your mail. For example if your name were “Christopher” or “Chris” then having mail delivered to “Topher” would be a bad idea. The collection point worker will expect to see ID for the nickname. You don’t have ID for the nickname, only your real name. They likely wont be familiar with nickname conventions from your home country. There is apparently a workaround involving giving yourself power of attorney over the other name, but I don’t have experience with this situation.

Quick Comparison to the UK

Generally mail in Sweden is better, providing you don’t mind it being slower on average. Both countries sometimes smash packages up. Mail between the UK and Sweden is a disaster. I don’t know the exact cause because mail to the US is also across the EU border and faster.

In the UK, I have met people who insist the Royal Mail system is perfect, and in a similar way there will be some people in Sweden who never experience a problem. In either country, if you’re sending or receiving lots of post, especially internationally, you are not likely to be one of those persons.

UK in Summary

• Deliveries generally pretty fast
• Parcels go to a depo when something goes wrong.
• Local letter delivery can be problematic. If you live on “Dock Road East” next to “Dock Road Estate”, then your mail is routinely going to go to the wrong place due to misread addresses. Miss-deliveries by last-leg staff common.
• Local parcel delivery can be problematic. Delivery drivers are under pressure to reach targets, so will play tricks such as to drop off an attempt card without ringing the doorbell etc.
• Integrity issues. A common one is when purchasing the “guaranteed 24 hour delivery” option. This results in the postperson signing for the letter if they cant deliver, in order to meet the deadline.
• Delivery service crime not uncommon: certain post depos known for parcels (e.g. laptop-shaped parcels) going missing
• Local crime: having a letterbox in the door is a hole for attackers to use a wire to fish for keys or drop objects in the house. But this is seen as normal.
• High-level problems: the post office did horrific things to many post office workers.
• Myths: I’ve met older persons who refuse to believe delivery problems exist. They emphasize the “Royal” in “Royal mail” when speaking. It’s just a company like any other nowadays.
• Consistent for everyone – we all get good or bad service depending on the local postal staff.

Sweden in Summary

• Deliveries generally a bit slower, but can be fast
• Parcels sometimes go to a depo and then prompt you for what you want to do next. This can be delivery at a certain time, or collect, or delivery to a local collection point.
• Local letter delivery strongly dependable: name on postbox generally has to match the letter, misdeliveries by last-leg staff rare.
• Local parcel delivery ok. Drivers generally seem to care about doing a good service and want to get your parcel to you.
• Integrity issues. The behaviour of PostNord sometimes feels systemically manipulated. Such as to benefit yearly statistics on stolen and lost mail.
• Delivery service crime: seems rare. PostNord support wouldn’t give contact details for the PostNord security team when a parcel disappeared in transit which made me doubt their yearly postal crime figures. But in hindsight I suspect it got returned to sender and they could see some information I couldn’t.
• Local crime: anyone can theoretically fish in your external letterbox. Your name is also written next to your house for potential weirdos and stalkers to read, but not a usual problem and seen as normal.
• High-level problems: PostNord Sweden is generally thought to be profitable but hindered due to the economics of PostNord Denmark.
• Myths: “When you shop you can pick which delivery company you want”. Except sometimes you get no choice. Many people also don’t realize that older addresses in Sweden can have no house number.
• Inconsistent for corner cases – works best with a Swedish phone number registered and an address that has a house number.

Delivery Times

The table below shows the typical delivery times we’ve experienced, “warts and all”.

Service	Delivery Time
Amazon.com parcel from the USA to local collection point	4 days
DB Schenker delivery to local pickup point	4 days
Official government letter via PostNord with a 10 day deadline to respond (e.g. migrationsverket request for additional evidence)	8 days (Sundsvall to Kramfors – about 80 minutes by car) Note that this gives you 2 days to respond
Delivery from a domestic online shop (jula.se)	14 days
Delivery from China	3-4 weeks
Bring 1 week home delivery option, within Sweden	28 days (washing machine installation)
Fully marked and customs declared gift-letter from the UK	2 months (gift stopped at customs for no declaration, declaration was present and complete)
Parcel from the UK	3weeks-2 months. Postcode often amended at Postnord Sundsvall, and misdelivered 12-30km away.
Government letter from the UK	2 months (UK HMRC letter)
Time-sensitive letter from pension company in the UK	5 months (1 of 2, second did not arrive) This was the slowest delivery that actually arrived.
Replacement bank card from the UK	Not received after two attempts

PostNord

The local delivery drivers are friendly, and come every other day. Larger parcels come via lorries.

You want to have a mobile number with an nordic country code. A non nordic number, e.g. from elsewhere in the EU, will result in things going wrong. Parcels will get sent to collection points and you wont get notified, but the PostNord tracking will say “sender notified”. This either someone at PostNord sent a notification message to that number but in the Swedish +46 international code, or that part of the PostNord system is just not sending texts to certain destinations. Usually a letter will be sent to your address telling you the parcel exists but sometimes that goes wrong too. Uncollected parcels go back to the sender.

Local Region Sorting Office

The first couple of years, parcels would be sent to us and then stopped at a sorting office 30km away. The sorting office would dispatch a letter saying “where would you like this sent”? which added a 2 day delay. This is to make sure you’re at home before bringing the parcel over. However when it was time critical, and you’re desperate for the parcel, you feel like it’s obvious that you would want it delivered to the address on the parcel. At the time it also had the odd effect of causing various other companies tracking information to break. An example was DHL Germany who handover to PostNord. Noone knew where the parcel was until the letter arrived.

An important cultural difference is that you cant drive to the local sorting office and ask if your parcel there. You need the letter or mobile app notification (discussed below). In the UK the centre has a small reception desk where you can try to resolve odd problems when they occur.

Notifications

Notifications of parcels awaiting collection or similar are received either via a letter or via the mobile app. The PostNord app work well, when everything works correctly. If you register your Nordic (Danish, Finnish, Norweigan or Swedish only) phone number and email address in the app then any mail destined to a recipient with those entered details in tracking gets the parcel automatically added to their account.

You need a notification from Postnord to collect it, you can’t just show ID and ask if there are deliveries for you. It’s not impossible to just register your email address, and use a foreign number it is just that you’ll generally have more weird unlucky things happen. I used a UK number for the first 6 months or so. Some post arrival notifications never arrived, although the Postnord system recorded that a notification was sent.

If your mail gets sent to the wrong collection point by PostNord then your available options are limited to local redelivery to adjacent collection points. Sometimes the parcels tracking also gets broken and you end up with odd zombie entries. The app seems to purge such entries after a period of time.

The tracking info PostNord staff can see versus that shown in the customer app appears to be different. I had one parcel vanish with no notification. Support didn’t seem to be bothered. I suspect they could see some kind of process failure and it was returned to sender but expected updates for that situation were missing in the mobile app. Or it was stolen. I asked support for the contact for PostNord theft reporting to flag it, but apparently that’s not given out to customers.

Weird Random Redirections

For about a year, any international mail coming through the Sundsvall sorting centre had someone mark my postcode as incorrectly addressed. They would then write a random postcode on the parcel, and then send the parcel to that location. This was odd the first few times, and PostNord support were able to redirect the initial ones. Support would always say the problem was with the original senders written address but it was correct when it arrived. After a while they refused to redirect the misdeliveries and blamed the senders which I suspected was related to some kind of performance statistics. For example it’s no longer a misdelivery if PostNord deny its a misdelivery.

I started getting quite frustrated and saving the parcels to prove they weren’t misaddressed and that this was an ongoing problem. I still have the small pile. The handwriting and pen on the redirected postcode was consistent, but the postcode that got added wasn’t. Frustratingly, I cant post photo evidence without revealing my exact address to the internet. I couldn’t make a complaint as only the sender can complain. Specifically PostNord say that the sender is the paying customer PostNord are supplying the service to.

I didn’t have a car at the time. As a result of the above situation I had to cycle a 60km round trip to get a heavy parcel. There was only a day to spare before it would be returned to the sender; the notification letter had been sent to the wrong postcode and then redirected to the correct one.

Giving up on International Post

Paranoia crept in; I began to wonder if perhaps this was someones deliberate behaviour. I had queried a parcel that was sent to the other side of Sweden, 2-3 hours drive away. Another packet went terminally missing in transit and I had asked for the security contact to report it. Or maybe someone in Sundsvall sorting was just being a little petty and my foreign sounding name was attracting some passive aggressive behaviour. Whatever the cause I told friends and family not to post things anymore for this reason. I then forgot about it as there were plenty of other immigration problems to handle.

Mobile App

The mobile app, like most apps in Sweden, integrates into BankID which is a great multi-factor authentication system that works well. Using the MFA system you can pre-authenticate for a parcel pickup. At the collection point you then just show a barcode in the app to the assistant and they scan it and give you the packet.

I tried suggesting to PostNords app team to have an option in the app to flag (escalate to support) when a parcel is in the process of being miss-routed. As a customer you can see in the app when a packet its suddenly being re-routed from Sundsvall to an odd destination as a result of a “misaddressed” flag being erroneously added. The app team said that a local post depo would normally see and automatically redirect such a packet to the correct depo, and therefore there was no need, but I have never seen that occur.

DHL

The DHL group are odd. They all share dhl.com website presence and email addresses but like to deny any relationship with any other part of DHL.

“DHL Express” mail comes to our house, and they’re generally good and efficient in procedures for customs and similar.

All my DHL (which is “DHL Freight Sweden”, not “DHL Express”) mail goes to a collection point about 13km away that’s open 08:00-17:00. It’s annoying to travel to if you don’t have a car. It resulted in some epic collection rides our first year or two during winter. Amazon.se sometimes send post via Postnord and sometimes via DHL. Even when I paid for Amazon Prime home delivery, parcels would go with DHL so there didn’t seem much point in Amazon Prime as a result.

Parcel tracking is all via DHL.com. Putting in a parcel, seeing information about a parcel and then clicking on the contact option will result in contacting DHL Freight Sweden. They will then deny any involvement, which is a weird customer experience. Below is an example query chain. the scenario is that a custoemr has a problem with a DHL parcel so they look up the tracking code on the DHL.com website and hit “contact” after viewing the details:

…and you get a response like this, which is friendly, but claims there’s no such parcel:

Unfortunately we can’t find any information on number [redacted]. Our tracking numbers are 10 digits long. This can also be referred to as “Waybill number”, “Shipment number” or similar. If you don´t have a 10-digit shipment ID I kindly refer you to the sender for further assistance. If you have further questions please feel free to contact us again by e-mail, chat or by phone

…at this point you feel like Alice in wonderland at the Mad Hatters tea party, where everyone around you is friendly but clinically insane, and so you try to message back:

but the dhl.com website link I gave in my message shows it:

https://www.dhl.com/se-sv/home/tracking/tracking-ecommerce.html?submit=1&tracking-id=[redacted]
I used the DHL contact form on the website to message yourselves?

…and then you realize it’s a broken relationship between the website and the local organisation:

Thank you for contacting us.

This is a shipment carried by DHL abroad. Us at DHL Freight Sweden do not handle this shipment. We recommend that you contact your consignor for further assistance.

Wish you a nice day.

Buying things in Germany can result in DHL Germany being involved. In this case the parcel is given to PostNord at the border and PostNord do the delivery within Sweden.

Bring

I generally try to avoid Bring. Bring take my post to the next town along, the same as DHL.

Once the driver took a packet to the next city by accident, and then Bring lost it before it could be redirected.

Sometimes the dropoff point forgets to scan an item as available, or as collected, and tracking breaks.

There is a Bring app and a Posten app. It appears to be the same app with different colours. Using one app logs you out of the other.

The first year, I paid for a Bring home installation option on a washing machine because getting it into the basement and hooked up was going to be an effort. I should have just paid the local plumber. Bring expected me to be home all day in the 1 week window. 1 week became 2 and then 3 with queries to the seller, Bring support and the installer direct. At the end of 4 weeks I had resigned to giving up when the installer finally came. I recognise the installer is a subcontractor but if it’s a Bring-labelled service then someone at Bring needs to be overseeing that service delivery occurs.

When things go wrong, Bring have a chatbot to talk you around in circles.

Early Bird

Early bird is funky. Your partner chooses this delivery method for a packet without telling you. Then at about 4am you wake to the noise of some strange car in your driveway and rush to look. You get to see a car you dont recognise in the driveway with a person taping a parcel to your postbox and then driving off. When it works it’s pretty good, and it’s cheap.

Sadly I’ve just used it this past fortnight and my parcel has disappeared from tracking about a week ago at one of the major cities. Their support has told me to wait a few more days and see what happens, but it has already been a week with no news.

DB Schenker

DB Schenker parcel delivery to my local pickup point is fast, and dependable. If a DB Schenker option exists on a website checkout, it’s a good sign.

DB Schenker home delivery is a little clunky. They get the parcel and message you as they want you to call them to check you will be in to deliver to. There is no avoiding the call (e.g. no email , chatbot, or bankID app verification). But other than this, they are good.

There is a DB Schenker app but it’s a bit basic.

UPS

UPS are good. They deliver to a local delivery company nearby, who then drop off the parcel the next working day.

There’s a small delay and tracking oddity caused by the handover. So if you get a notification on a Friday that you parcel is delivered, and it’s not with you, then you remember it is UPS and you packet will arrive on Monday via the local delivery company.