Research preview
What the preliminary research already shows
The RFI asks for capability statements. We think the more useful evidence is the work itself: here is where each of the four research notes already stands after HSG's own pre-bid research sprint, with the full evidence base one click deeper in Meridian.
USPS leads the category's rarest asset and monetizes it least
Only 22% of the world's posts run an electronic mailbox at all, and the consumer-paid ones keep failing (Germany, Canada, Australia all shut theirs down). Informed Delivery is the largest in the world. The models that survive abroad are sender-pays (Switzerland), government-anchored (Denmark, Italy), and fee-for-convenience (Ireland's 54% digital-stamp premium). Fifteen operators profiled.
The audience is USPS's; the monetization layer belongs to everyone else
usps.com draws roughly double the traffic of ups.com or fedex.com, and USPS Mobile is the best-rated carrier app on iOS. Meanwhile UPS sells delivery control for $19.99/yr, FedEx sells it per transaction, Amazon sets the free-UX bar, and the third-party postage layer sells USPS's own product with a better interface, deeper discounts, and now a 3% tax on USPS spend.
The sharpest exhibit: a third party out-competes usps.com at selling USPS postage
Twelve documented findings across five revenue tasks, scored by severity against Nielsen and Baymard anchors: forced account creation on the flagship label flow, a $1.25 online fee for a task that is free at the counter, an enrollment ceiling on Informed Delivery's own growth, and an app that earns a 4.8 rating but hands off every purchase.
The binding constraint is not the law
Eleven opportunities screened against 39 U.S.C. 404(e), the PRC's mail-nexus doctrine, the market-test authority, and PSRA 2022's untouched government-services lane (zero agreements, four years in). The high-value moves are legally available; the blocked ones are also the ones that failed their pilots, and the register says so plainly.
A taste of the cross-cutting findings
Findings that only show up when you run all four tasks together
Digital mailboxes fail without a government mandate
Germany (E-POST, 2022), Canada (epost, 2022), and Australia (2017) all shut consumer digital mailboxes down. The two durable successes are Denmark, where government Digital Post is mandatory, and Switzerland, where the sender pays. The lesson for Task 4: consumer-paid mailboxes fail; sender-paid and government-anchored models survive.
The channel-data gap is itself a finding
Across ten years of 10-Ks, RPW reports, and PRC compliance determinations, USPS reports revenue by product class, never by channel. Click-N-Ship appears zero times in the FY2025 10-K. Answering research questions 1-3 depends on OIG-internal data, which is exactly how the SOW divides the work, and our Task 4 sizing is built to swap public proxies for that internal data the moment it is available.
Embedded wholesale / channel revenue share: the strategic counter-move
UPS grew its Digital Access Program from roughly $150M to over $4B a year by paying the software intermediaries and keeping the relationship. USPS sits in the same channel as an unbranded rate card. That contrast, not any single feature gap, is the largest structural monetization difference the domestic benchmark surfaces.
Friction and opportunity are the same list
Every barrier in the Task 3 register discounts a Task 4 estimate: the Informed Delivery enrollment ceiling caps the advertising base, checkout friction suppresses the label revenue any premium tier would ride on, and the $1.25 online change-of-address fee inverts the economics of USPS's cheapest channel. The two notes are written as one analysis with two lenses.
All findings on this page are preliminary results of open-source review captured August 2026, with sources recorded in the evidence base. Under the engagement each finding is verified, extended with OIG-facilitated internal data where research questions 1-3 provide it, and delivered in the SOW’s Word-format research notes.