Recommended Courier Service?

[mje]

They do all (the posters in your link) have valid grievances.

I make my cheque out to "Fastway" and get a VAT invoice from them in the normal way.

Never have I had to make a reference to the franchise ( and ours has changed) so as far as I was / am concerned I am paying the parent company...also I just looked at an invoice given to me by the original guy and the one that took over at Christmas....they both have the same VAT number, invoice address etc.

It is a poor way to carry on, and if not illegal, certainly very iffy!

[Paul Bulpit]

That saves me going into a great long explanation as to how they actually operate. For the UK:

1*. The business model is severely flawed.

2*. Regional Franchisees have more money than sense (or understand the schema and seek to defraud).

3*. Courier Franchisees are desperate people trying to earn a buck - & invaraibly lose out, to their cost, with no leg to stand on. They are good men taken for a ride.

4. All this is funded by the poor gullible customer - us business people paying up front on a false promise. A few hundred quid lost here and there does not result in any substantial claim.

* Further evidence available on request.

Nuff said case closed.

[mje]

* Further evidence available on request.

Point 2 - heavy stuff to suggest they set out to defraud ? can't be that clever

[eck247]

Has anyone been able to negotiate preferred rates with UPS ? We have been trying to open an account with several couriers but because we are a new startup and cant guarantee a certain amount of parcels each week nobody even shows an interest in talking to us !!!!

[Darren B]

Has anyone been able to negotiate preferred rates with UPS ? We have been trying to open an account with several couriers but because we are a new startup and cant guarantee a certain amount of parcels each week nobody even shows an interest in talking to us !!!!

rates with UPS are dependant of parcels shipped, basically 14 or more parcels a week will get you the starting discount and this is done on a rolling week so if your short on friday send yourself a couple of parcels.

if your new then use one of the sites that offer discount rates http://www.parcel2go.com & http://www.myparceldelivery.com i have not used these but they are a place to start for newbies

[Sean Williams]

We're with UPS and their base discount rate (for us at any rate) is for 11+ parcels a week.
They've just revised their rates down for us too.

Otherwise, Interparcel.com - we've had good service from them over the past couple of years and their Standard carrier is UPS.

[Darren B]

We're with UPS and their base discount rate (for us at any rate) is for 11+ parcels a week.
They've just revised their rates down for us too.

Otherwise, Interparcel.com - we've had good service from them over the past couple of years and their Standard carrier is UPS.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

seriously avoid interparcel, making a claim took me over two months of phone calls to finally get a cheque, i requested it paid via bacs and they refused. They ignore emails and the telephone is 0845 and they never, i mean never ring you back even when they promise to.

As for UPS, we use them for some stuff, this still equates to 30+ parcels a week and we have moved up the discount rate (automatically) so its cheaper now than when we did some calculations

[ShinyHappySimon]

We've been using Interlink for a few years now and, for the most part, they've been pretty decent. (at least compared to Amtrak who we used before)

Having said that they've just hiked up their prices, so we'll probably need to have a fresh look around.

[toolman.co.uk]

MJE, PM me if you are interested in a quantity of brown tickets, as my local franchisee went bust so I can't use them.

I got a load of data bags I need to shift, paid £4 each for em, will take £3 each

[oldhasbeen]

Interesting thread - our wholesalers seem to jump ship fairly regularly between couriers, and it seems that nobody can offer a consistent and reliable service for long

Does anyone out there have recommendations for a decent courier service? I have used Despatch Bay (using DHL) for the last 2 years and used to be great on cost and service. Now DHL domestic services have sold out to 'Yodel'/Home Delivery Network and their service now is next to useless, I've had more upset customers in the last few weeks than I've had in the last 2 years altogether.

Same here Ian. Losing the ad hoc collection earlier this year was inconvenient but no great shakes as we use them primarily for high value or high weight parcels (both domestic and international). But totally agree, their "new and improved" system is total pants. Now the collection is not booked until the day AFTER you print the labels - well I'm sorry, but at that point, those parcels are processed and ready to ship and I should be able to book a collection in advance.

We've also noticed additional debits popping up on our account (including a "return parcel charge" for something which was delivered 2 years ago!) and remote area charges (sometimes slapped on 4 weeks after delivery) - go through your account history like a hawk! Needless to say we've had all charges refunded, but now I have to make a claim on a parcel returned as "consignee has moved away" even though she was home all day expecting the parcel. I've resent the parcel by RM Special Delivery and will obviously seek reimbursement for the higher RM charges.

We've looked into Royal Mail's parcel service a few times and had a visit from our "account manager" a couple of years ago (we already have a regular PPI account) - our previous account manager left RM about 8 years ago (who we'd never met), so I always thought they were fictitious. However, now they seem to be nothing more than sales agents.

Again, idiocracy abounds - I can take a parcel down to the post office and use the RM parcel service, but I can't use it as a business on-line unless I can guarantee 5k parcels a year on that service alone? I'm sorry, but I'm not trundling off down the P.O every other day, when we get a nice man in a red van come to our premises to collect every day.

I can't knock RM on the whole given the amount of parcels they handle - couriers (either sending or receiving) seem to have a proportionately much higher fail rate. But unless you send everything by courier, getting reasonable rates is very difficult. It's whether to just stick with Despatch Bay while their "new and improved" system beds in (and only use them where there is absolutely no time issue involved), or jump out of the frying pan and potentially into the fire? Having tried numerous other couriers over the years, there's no easy answer.

Regards - Helen

[saucysal]

No problem touch wood with DHL

We have been using Interlink (and Interlink DPD for overseas), Yodel and Royal Mail for some time.

We have been very pleased with Interlink, though they have just put their prices up. Yodel migrated us from Yodel HDNL to Yodel DHL recently, and we have been very pleased with the service, with not a single problem caused by them during several weeks of using, rather different to other reports in this thread. Royal Mail Tracked we have been using with very few problems for a few years, but their prices double from next Saturday, so we will be stopping using them - their 3 day service will cost more than Interlink next day.

Sarah

[chickenhouseman]

We've started to use royal mail tracked which is working ok. With an almost guaranteed next day service it seems to work. We had to change our collection time to mid afternoon so they got into the system early enough but it's miles better than 1st class which could take 10 days. Items are tracked through the system and there is the option of choosing a safe place for the parcel to be left or having a signature.

The pricing is based on volume and average weight.

For heavier items we use parcelforce (for almost 7 years now) and as they also handle the overseas stuff no one can really touch them on price especially as we regularly send out 30kg parcels. We have had better prices from some of the other carriers but only for upto 10kg and then the want more for the heavier stuff. And it would screw the overseas prices.