New Royal Mail Sizes

[mje]

This will hit "doing it on the side" Ebay traders, and like many with a High Street shop that gets my support, clearly now the cost of a "small parcel" is going to exceed the value of the goods often.

RM did not address my original point to them that standard compensation is now £20 (down from £46)

End of the day, many including us are somewhat stuck with this... ultimately the cost of carriage is paid by the consumer, and we personally do get a good service from Royal Mail, maybe that is what they are banking on when the dust settles......"no alternative"

It is difficult to compute that a plastic fitting weighing just 8g, but is size of a 50p, costs £3 to post, same price as a book weighing 999g.....it's quite amusing in the post office watching stuff being squashed, or compacted with tape so it drops through the slot!

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

On a side note, I believe that the volume for RM business accounts has been reduced to 1000 items per year - does anyone know if collection is standard with a business account or if it's an additional cost?

It is an additional cost.
The price has just risen from £750 + VAT to £775 + VAT for weekday collections + £240 + VAT if you want a Saturday collection
The collection is free if you spend over £15,000 per year with RM.

You also get free collections if you use the Royal Mail Tracked service which has also had it minimum reduced to just 1000 parcel per year, so it may be worth checking our how much more expensive the RM Tracked service are and compare them to the prices for RM24 and RM48. I believe you can use both the RM 24/48 (Originally Packetpost) and RM Tracked so you could put just 1000 parcels per year through as RM Tracked and the rest as normal to save the collection charge which would work out the equivalent of 77.5p + VAT per parcel saving.

If RM tracked is not a huge amount more than std it might be worth considering.

[gpzzone]

I've been musing this Royal mail issue for a week or more now, and frankly am totally out of ideas, as to what formula to use in order to maintain a fair carriage pricing structure.

I now think that perhaps the day has arrived whereby software based web shopfronts cannot cope with the huge number of factors which must now be considered if using Royal Mail as your preferred carrier. So much for RM demonstrating an awareness of our needs - something of an own goal I feel, and stand by for a U turn in 6 months time.

The only realistic option for many will be to approach their carrier, in our case DPD, and try and negotiate a better rate in return for switching the packet traffic to them. At least this will be less complex to cater for when designing your shipping tables, but will undoubtedly and unavoidably lead to an increased expense, which naturally must get passed on if we are to maintain our profit margin.

Thanks Royal Mail - for nothing!

[mje]

We ship frozen fish foods most days and couriers cannot offer a next day service to some UK postcodes, so for years I have sent these items "Special Delivery" - it has always irritated me that 2050g costs same as 9999g - with nothing in between - new price is £25.80 and of course we have to add VAT to this making it over £30.00 = not easy to explain to customer.

Anyway, lady in the post office said to me "try Parcel Force Express 24 hour tracked" - costs £9 less for the weight we send - we just have to get the packages to the Post Office by 2.30pm instead of 4.30pm.

Shirley also told me that it had become apparent that sending some parcels to mainland Europe is cheaper than with in the UK ... I have no reason to doubt her, in fact I feel very sorry for the counter staff.

Royal mail CEO - moya.greene@royalmail.com

[Mike Hughes]

ok. If you're considering parcelforce then take a look at 'despatch bay'

You can still drop off at the post office.

Mike

[gail]

We got a Royal mail account even though we don't sell nearly enough to meet there criteria. A very nice man from the PO contacted us one day and gave us all kinds of advice about boosting traffic to our website. He kept in contact over the months and offered us a contract a couple of weeks ago.

My first thought was 'what's the catch?' but so far I haven't seen any. They are perfectly happy to take just one or two orders a day from us, presumably on the idea that when we grow we'll stick with them.

Even before this we have had nothing but good service and in 10 years we have lost exactly 1 order and even then that was sent abroad so it could have got lost anywhere.

As an aside though we got one of those cardboard parcel size templates to measure the mail. We thought it rather flimsy so ordered a Perspex one off of eBay. On its arrival we compared sizes and I was dismayed to find the Perspex one approx 4mm smaller in the sizing of the parcels. I was all set to fire off an indignant email to the eBay seller when I decided to use a ruler and measure the openings. It turns out that the Perspex one is right and the official PO one is wrong

[PatchworkRabbit]

This will hit "doing it on the side" Ebay traders, and like many with a High Street shop that gets my support, clearly now the cost of a "small parcel" is going to exceed the value of the goods often.

RM did not address my original point to them that standard compensation is now £20 (down from £46)

End of the day, many including us are somewhat stuck with this... ultimately the cost of carriage is paid by the consumer, and we personally do get a good service from Royal Mail, maybe that is what they are banking on when the dust settles......"no alternative"

It is difficult to compute that a plastic fitting weighing just 8g, but is size of a 50p, costs £3 to post, same price as a book weighing 999g.....it's quite amusing in the post office watching stuff being squashed, or compacted with tape so it drops through the slot!

Sorry for dredging, but this has my mystified. How does something the size of a 50p weighing 8g cost £3 to post?? If we assume that with all your packing, it's too big to go as a letter, then a large letter weighing less than 100g costs 90p with stamps or 71p franked.

Gail, thanks for your post re: the account. I didn't realize that the limit was as low as 1000 pieces, and if they'll do it for less than that, then I might give them a ring. I pay for a franking machine at the moment, and if it will replace that then it seems a bargain to me.

I'm pretty pro Royal Mail, to be honest. I come from a country where it takes 3 days to send a letter to your next door neighbour, so if I can post something in London at 7pm (my local sort office has a late last pick up) and it can get to Scotland the next morning, for the price of a first class stamp, then you won't hear any complaints from me.

[saucysal]

Gail - False Sense of Security

20 years ago, when we were sending very few items per day and certainly did not fulfil the criteria for an account, or a free collection, or "Packetpost", a very nice man from the Royal Mail came to see us and offered us all these services, no fees, regardless. We were happily using them, could expand our business partly because of it, and just when we were about to fulfill all the criteria anyway for the services, they suddenly decided to take it all away. For a year had to pay for collections, and make do without Packetpost - they do their figures a year in advance, so had to pay for the year that actually fulfilled the critera, as the previous year did not. I was furious, made a big fuss, but got nowhere. Since then we have expanded further, fulfilling their old criteria easily, and rather annoyed that they have now reduced the criteria, which had they done sooner would have saved us a lot of money previously.

Sarah

[mje]

Sorry for dredging, but this has my mystified. How does something the size of a 50p weighing 8g cost £3 to post?? If we assume that with all your packing, it's too big to go as a letter, then a large letter weighing less than 100g costs 90p with stamps or 71p franked.

Max thickness is 2.5cm for "large letter" - so ships as small parcel,

[Mike Hughes]

I think the point being made is that a 50p might be more than 2.5cm long / wide but is only 2mm thick so would go as a Large Letter as you'd lay it flat in the envelope.

Mike

[gail]

Thanks Sal that's interesting to know. However we just put our packets into sacks and drop them in at the post office. The bill gets settled at the end of the month so if they decide to take it away all it means is we go back to paying normal postage rates.

It's worth it just to walk past all the queues at the counter and hand over our bags!!!!

[TJWM]

Interesting bit on last nights Watchdog on the new postal sizes, worth watching on the Iplayer for any one who posts small packet or larger.

[Mike Hughes]

Nothing new really. Just picking up on the anomaly that the largest 'small parcel' can be much larger than the smallest 'Medium Parcel' as long as one of the dimensions is under 8cm.

There was also a bit about how a long thin parcel, could break the regular 61cm length limit for a medium parcel as long as you can fit it into a tube with combined length + 2 x diameter < 104cm.

So if you send a lot of 65cm long items with 14cm sides then you could still send them as medium parcels rather than large as long as you put them in a tube.

Best thing to do is get an OBA account. It'll save you money and there's none of this small / medium / large parcel business.

Mike

[mje]

Given a leaflet today in the Post Office detailing a new size for "small parcel"

L 35cm W 25cm D16cm .. max

• 2nd class up to 1kg £2.60 - 1 to 2kg £5.60
• 1st class up to 1kg £3.00 - 1 to 2 kg £6.85

[Air-Tech]

Given a leaflet today in the Post Office detailing a new size for "small parcel"

L 35cm W 25cm D16cm .. max

• 2nd class up to 1kg £2.60 - 1 to 2kg £5.60
• 1st class up to 1kg £3.00 - 1 to 2 kg £6.85

Any idea when this comes into force?

I've had a look R.M. & P.O. websites, but cant find any reference to it....