South African Post Office Tracking. Free & Online.

The South African Post Office (SAPO) links two trackers from its Track My Parcel page: Track My Domestic Parcel and a separate one for international parcels. TrackParcel reads the one it calls domestic. The real delivered item TrackParcel was checked against was an international arrival, running from Incoming International to Delivered/Collected. The Post Office says items can also be tracked in its free app, and its footer links EMS to a separate EMS South Africa site.

The Post Office prints the tracking number on the sender's receipt and describes it as starting and ending with two letters, with numbers in between. Keep it until the item arrives; you need it, with your ID, to collect.

The TrackParcel search box removes spaces, hyphens, brackets and a pasted label such as AWB: before the lookup. TrackParcel then sends the Post Office only 4 to 40 letters and digits, and reports anything else that reaches it as not found without asking. Auto-Detect offers SAPO only for that two-letter, nine-digit shape ending in ZA, listed after India Post. An item from abroad can keep its foreign letters, as the real delivered item TrackParcel read did, so pick South African Post Office yourself.

TrackParcel reads the tracker the Post Office links as Track My Domestic Parcel. It takes the overall status from the Currently has status of line, and the history from the table of Type, Date, Time, Branch and Comments, showing Type as the event with the comment beside it.

The tracker lists the history newest first, dated year, month and day on a 12-hour clock. TrackParcel keeps that order, reads the times as South African time (SAST) and shows them converted to IST, labelled IST. The newest scan's branch becomes the destination only once the item is delivered.

The tracker answers a number it does not hold with No tracking record found under its search box, on a page identical for every unknown number. TrackParcel reports not found for that reply or similar no-record wording; a maintenance notice, an empty page or any error status except too many requests shows the Post Office as unavailable instead. If a correct number keeps failing, ask at your local post office first.

SARS, not the Post Office, sets the import tax on an international item; the Post Office collects it as SARS's agent. It also charges its own customs clearance fee of R58.50 on incoming parcels and R30.20 on other postal items, even when nothing else is due. If the SARS charge seems too high, the item can go back to SARS for reassessment.

Parcels are collected at your local post office counter, because they do not fit a postbox; door delivery needs the Speed Services Courier's Door-to-Door option. Your local post office can redirect a parcel to another address for a fee, and is the first place to ask about a missing item, before the Customer Service Centre. Suspected tampering goes to the Crime Buster Hotline.