Click & Drop anyone?

[Air-Tech]

Is anyone out there happily using Click & Drop?

I signed up for it a few months ago with the imminent withdraw of DMO & have used it on a few occasions when it's been an easier day, but it's been a bit of a long winded & frustrating exercise every time...

Being able to set products up for recall may be great for those who are consistently shipping the same things, but when no two orders that are going out are same size / weigh (comprised of multiple different items), it seems to be of little use. As setting up products appears to be of little use, everything that we put through Click & Drop is being done manually, it's mind numbing & the system doesn't seem to be set up for this.

Defaulting of the weight to gm rather than Kg's (what our scales read & just what we have been used to doing for a long time) is a pain & the apparent lack of being able to set up a printer with labels on demand is a pain as well.

All that being said, it possible that I'm just getting too old & set in my ways for this malarkey - any comments appreciated.

[Mike Hughes]

I did sign up for Royal Mail click and drop a few months ago but thought it was awful, far worse than DMO, so didn’t even use it.

Is it just me, or can you not lookup the address from the postcode as you can with DMO? I find this really useful as it saves lots of copying and pasting and verifies the address at the same time.

[Air-Tech]

Is it just me, or can you not lookup the address from the postcode as you can with DMO? I find this really useful as it saves lots of copying and pasting and verifies the address at the same time.

There is an address lookup field on right of the manual entry screen - it looks like a rehash of RM's online postcode finder & would be more at home on a tablet with a 6YO working it.....

[martinrcw]

How are you getting on with the new click and drop system, are you processing orders manually and individually or do you have an automated bulk way ?

[Air-Tech]

Reasonably well & far better than I had thought. It's generally a bit slicker / quicker than DMO & seems to be a bit more stable. The only noticeable downfall is that "print on demand" could be set in DMO preferences, so printing was a one button affair (open label PDF, send to the correct printer & close). In click & drop this is a multi click affair & a pain in the a**.

We have really just transposed what we were doing manually in DMO, so no automation..... I haven't had a thorough read through the set up yet, but as far as I know the weight has to be passed along with the other data - with a couple of thousand products, & most orders containing multiple products the weight totals in Sellerdeck don't accurately reflect the actual weight. Many product weights have been tweaked to fit them into the appropriate shipping services & the weights in Zone/Class have also been massaged to get things about right - I'm struggling to see how we could set things up to be accurate with respect to the actual package weight.

The other thing that puts me off automation - at the moment, we loose some & gain some in shipping charges & it all works out about even. If it was automated as it currently is, I'll be paying RM too much for underweight packages & customers will be getting insufficient postage charges for overweight packages, neither of which would be ideal.

Happy Easter.

[Mike Hughes]

I do it manually too and it's definitely quite a bit quicker and easier than DMO.

Automation of things such as name and address transfer would be quite easy but I like to use the address label as an opportunity to check the address and postcode and eliminate address errors (which we do get).

[Air-Tech]

Oh well, that's Click & Drop virtually unusable for the 4th time in recent history - "intermittent page load times" being the culprit....

It appears to be a load issue as so far it's always Mondays (including the return from a bank holiday) that it all goes wrong on........

WDM that Parcelforce use, which appears to be a re-branded version of RM's "old" DMO continues to plod on just fine without let-downs - makes me want DMO back!

[martinrcw]

Yes we are in the same position, DMO was fine, was forced into Click and Drop and its failed for us today. There is a status page for it

https://clickanddrop.statuspage.io/

[Air-Tech]

It's become that much of a pain in the a** that we now have a Sellerdeck email layout specifically for notifying customers....

[Mike Hughes]

Yeas. Today it's being a real PITA.

I just got this come up. Fingers crossed it will be back operating soon

"To all of our customers,
On behalf of everyone at Click & Drop, we sincerely apologise for the issues that some of you have experienced today as a result of ongoing technical difficulties.
Our team have been working with Microsoft throughout the day to address the issues, and we are now seeing a return to normal service.
If you are still unable to produce your labels through Click & Drop, we do recommend taking your mail to a Post Office.
We are treating this with the highest priority, and we fully understand and appreciate the severity of these issues."

[Mike Hughes]

There have been various improvements made over the years and I quite like the Click and Drop system now. There are a couple of things that would make it just a little bit easier to use with sellerdeck but on the whole it does a good job.

The way I use it:

- you copy the postcode over and the select the right address from the drop down list it gives you.
- You then copy over the customers name
- It'll then take you to postage page where you enter the package weight and select the service you want (24, 48, letter, large letter, parcel, etc)
- You then get a label downloaded to your PC which you can print off on your label printer. (there is an auto-print option being introduced / available as well)
- Then you just fix the label to your parcel and it's ready to go. It has the name, address, postage details, etc on it and includes a barcode which gets scanned on delivery so you can check online to see if it's been delivered.
- If anything goes wrong you can delete the label on the system and start again.
- At the end of the day you bag up your parcels, 'manifest' the parcels and the batch on the system and print out the manifest for the bag collection / drop off.

The system will ask you for the CN22 details if needed and you can print off the CN22 on your label printer.

[Goz]

Andy at Codepath has produced a routine that exports shipped orders for a given date range into a CSV file in the correct format for Clink and Drop - I use it and it works very well.