Going back 50 years or so, you wouldn’t have had many options when you wanted to send any packages through the post. Most people would have only had the choice to take their package to their local Post Office for it to be delivered. However, over the course of time, the availability of parcel delivery companies has increased dramatically.
The first real competition came about when an increased number of companies such as DHL began setting up and gave people a different choice to the Post Office. With more and more couriers setting up the availability increased and the overall cost started to come down. The major increase in the market has occurred over the last decade due to the proliferation of the internet.
The cost of setting up a business before the internet made things so much easier would have been high, it would have also been much harder to get started as well. Now though, the overall cost of setting up online is much less than it would have been before the internet became so widespread. This has ultimately lead to a major increase in courier companies being set up online.
Conducting any searches related to packages or couriers will bring up a large amount of results now. With such high levels of competition, each company needs to find ways to entice customers to use their company rather than that of a competitor. This naturally results in customers being able to find much cheaper prices than they would have before the large increase. You will usually find that you can get discounts on bulk orders with a lot of parcel delivery companies and the cost of sending items abroad is now not that much more than a domestic package.