Royal Mail/Courier

[Graham Hall]

Royal Mail.... aaaah! was doing really well for me during Y2006 and then Christmas arrived and it all went to pot. A significant proportion of my deliveries 'went missing' with customers (many of whom are regular) never getting their goods. And now this morning, I've got another one!

Can anyone point me at a courier company or two that can compete with Royal Mail?

And did you know that when Royal Mail lose a parcel they'll only give you back the cost of the goods, i.e the price you paid you supplier. You can kiss goodbye to any warehouse fees, postage, packing, admin and other overhead. Also love the way (not) their first class costs jump from £2.70 to £4.74 when a package goes over 1Kg.

Would appreciate any advice/insight

[george]

To my knowledge we had one small parcel went missing from hundreds posted out in December, that was including something like 20 odd different counties. (Two have not arrived yet to Peru and Saudi Arabia but I wouldn't say they were `lost` yet).

Searching the forum will reveal a few good threads about couriers, the different deals and the various price differences.

[fleetwood]

Its all down to what you are selling.
I'd say if your average parcel value is sub £30, and average weight is sub 2kg, Royal mail are hard to beat.

A search on the forum will throw up previous discussions on this topic, but to summarise our own findings:

As George has said, the 'lost' rate is very low.
Most 'lost' parcels, are simply customers not at home to receive a package, and saying that they had not received an attempted delivery card (wouldn't hurt them to check their local sorting office if they were expecting a parcel that didn't turn up - card or no card!).
Most 'lost' parcels are sitting at the sorting office or with a neighbour.

Yup, 'lost' parcels go up at Xmas time - there is a delivery overload on everybody - so attempts at a second delivery, after the first fails (nobody at home), don't always get carried out.
I would think this effects most if not all delivery services who supply B2C.

Royal Mail suck at compensation for loss claims - invariably, we don't bother.
Simply don't use insured mail if your parcels are sub £30.
Save the 65p+ fee for Recorded delivery or more for special delivery.
If 1 parcel in 100 goes missing, there's 100x65p = £65 in your pot to settle your claim without even troubling the Royal Mail claims dept.

No-one else comes close to the value for money (at sub 2kg).

Couriers may provide stronger guarantees (how these stand up under a loss claim I can't comment), but it comes at a price.

[Mike Hughes]

I also find Royal Mail good value. My parcel losses run at about 1 in 500 which isn't a major problem for the business.

In my experience, good addressing, return labels and tidy packaging all help keep the losses down.

8 times out 10, when a customer reports a non-delivery it's down to the parcel being delayed and or waiting for collection.

Mike

[jont]

Graham - may be worth removing your email from your post as the spam bots love the Actinic forum - users can use the forum email address against your profile.

Nobody can really touch RM for cost and come Christmas all carriers fall down as deliveries are stretched beyond capacity. You need to weigh the costs saved via using RM (to say FedEx or whoever) and the real cost of relacing parcels (storage, time, upset customers etc)... for small parcels RM often win out.

[acompton]

I can also add my support of RM. We sent several hundred parcel in the run-up to Christmas; only a few late deliveries and not one loss. Everything was delivered in time for Christmas. Our orders are a mix of weights from 100g to 8kg. Only gripe is that we are still in the queing-at-the-Post-Qffice stage and this gets to be a hassle in the run-up; particular with a lot of heavy items. The staff at the local PO are very friendly and efficient, but the sheer length of the queue is daunting. Probably need a re-think for next Crimbo.

Alan

[george]

Alan, do a search in the forum for Royal Mail, we get our mail picked up now for £250 a year. Sounds a lot, but you also only pay them once a month via Direct Debit which may save you on bank charges if you pay the PO daily by Switch etc.

Martin aka Fleetwood aka Comic Man convinced me to take the plunge and its been a great decision.

PS Our local post office people don't talk to me now though... BIG sulk going on lol. Our local RM contact is excellent at explaining everything to start with. Only thing we needed was a digital scales that coust fifty quid.

PPS Did read something about a minimum charge per collection from sometime this year, I must fish out from the Paper Mountain desk and investigate.

[fleetwood]

Glad to be of service George

(I'm not actually from Fleetwood btw )

[chris ashdown]

Just to add to above we also use RM Packet post, a lot cheaper than just normal rm post .

Reluctant to pay the £250 so just bundle it all up in bags and leave at post office who take it into the back when they have no queing

For Packet-post about £1500 per year is expected to be spent but have heard they dont inforce this if above £1000

Use Citylink for orders over 2kg as cheaper (they have not realised we have changed to RM yet and keep our old rates on a higher quantity)

[ASMO]

We used to use a Franking Machine from Pitney Bowes which we found great for the convenience of putting the postage on before going to sorting office. However, was very expensive for hire of machine/scales and for the specific ink used in the frank. Got rid of this system after about 2 years and went back to buying stamps.
Then the SmartStamp came in and we jumped on that. Fantastic idea. £4.99 per month for licence and updates. You can top up your postage via Debit/Credit Card. Print out your own franks with company logo or slogan on using a normal printer. All you need to do is get some scales to weigh your items. Since most of our items are large parcels this actually only involves a few weights. You can print your franks on labels or as we do just normal paper then cut them up and stick on with sellotape (we like this method because we can get a return address, company logo and postage on one strip, slightly narrower than packing tape, then we use packing tape to stick in on. We are too tight to use big labels!)
We have very few problems with RM and even with the price increase it is still cheaper than couriers. In addition, our business is surprisingly seasonal, so a courier that prices on monthly business would be expensive for us in some months, but even out in other months. As far as cash flow is concerned, paying more postage in months when we have lots of orders is OK.

[Jim Riley]

Totally support the £250 RM pick up service. Fantastic value for money. Gordon (our postie) arrives at 3.00 p.m. on the dot - every working day. You can get this service for free if you spend more than £15,000 directly with royalmail.com each year too. Once you have the pickup service running smoothly, you wonder why you ever trudged down to the PO with all those letters and parcels.

Jim

[QUOTE=george]Alan, do a search in the forum for Royal Mail, we get our mail picked up now for £250 a year. Sounds a lot, but you also only pay them once a month via Direct Debit which may save you on bank charges if you pay the PO daily by Switch etc.

[completerookie]

I spoke with our RM pickup guy about this topic, his opinion was that the "extra losses" are down to "agency guys" taking a fancy to certain types of labels and then denying any knowledge of having taken it out this morning.
certainly seams plausible,

[Stereo Steve]

Just to add my thoughts. We send maybe 5-600 items a week by RM and they are brilliant in my view. Losses run at about .5% over time and we don't bother claiming as we put a little on everry package to build a buffer.

As echoed above, don't use recorded or insured if you are sending stuff under £30. The claims procedure is difficult and time consuming. Put the 65p's aside and write it off when it happens. We would have spent somewhere in the region of £17,000 on recorded fees last year and we maybe had to replace 40-50 items at a cost of maybe £500 instead over the year.

USe Packet Post, it's brilliant and push for a collection. We get free 4pm collection and the guys bring us bags etc so it's very easy.

Another bonues is free returns if the item is not delivered.

Now, couriers......We have tried to increase our volume dramatically so we can get a good courier rate and have achieved this. However, I'm starting to wonder if I should have bothered as it's so much hassle. Losses run much higher with the ones we have tried (Interlink, PF, Business Post) and the return, redelivery and other fees are horrendous. It's almost a full time job providing then with phone numbers and sorting lost and returned items! They also damage more than Royal Mail and all their proimises are usually rubbish as service and policy varies from depot to depot.

So, we are now looking at moving a lot of volume back to good old RM. No software needed, no labels to create (just a PPI stamp and an actinic integrated). No, you can't track it online and yes you leave yourself open to chargebacks etc. but all in, it's far less work.

I would also point out the the Packet Post rates are changing in April again with some small rises for lower priced items but much cheaper for up to 2KG (eg, the 1750-2000kg rate for 2nd Packet will be 314p) . I have the PDF somewhere if anyone wants it.

Most of our stuff is under 2kg and worth around £10 so it's going to be bye bye to one of our couriers then.

[jont]

Driver Honesty

After always hearing about drivers stealing consignments was amazed to just hear from our carriers APC about an item sent as a gift to a third party.

The recipient signed for the parcel then declared he did not want it and the driver could have it! The driver returned the item to the depot who have duly informed us.

[Stereo Steve]

APC is the one I keep hearing good things about. I've always thought they would be too expensive for us but maybe I should give them a ring.