Royal Mail Collection

[JamesC]

We get a RM daily collection and the annual renewal is up - £500 lump sum.

We nearly spend the £5000 a year with them that qualifies for automatic discounts, they told us. Anybody know what those are, roughly? We could send some more stuff with them rather than courier if it was big.

Anybody ever haggled with them and either got the collection fee waived or reduced. They said when we asked they could come every other day but then it would be an ad hoc collection and cost £12 each so would be more overall? (I'm a bit wary that a lot of big companies are convenient with the truth at the moment or accidentally overcharging, as our bank did recently)

We only really need this collection because of 1 large customer so it's a bit frustrating as we only charge them the cost of delivery by previous agreement so have to sink it (our own stuff we could take to the PO which is at the end of our street once or twice a week). It is still better now paying £500 than taking 30 individual rolled prints to the PO overall mind.

Any ideas?..

[Grahame Case]

what are you shipping James, if you don't mind me asking?

it might be cheaper to courier the stuff - Parcel2go are always handy.

some couriers will give you pretty hefty discounts if you send a lot of stuff.

[Jonny2morsos]

Try Fastway Couriers

http://www.fastwaycouriers.co.uk/8HomepageGeneric.html

You will need to speak to your local franchisee.

[CanvasChris]

Try www.sendex.co.uk

They quote £3.99 a parcel... you do have to send 50 a week though to qualify.

[Matt]

Try Fastway Couriers

http://www.fastwaycouriers.co.uk/8HomepageGeneric.html

You will need to speak to your local franchisee.

Which is grand until the local franchise closes. When we were using them (Not for prints) you bought the labels upfront. Still got em somewhere

For lightweight smaller sized stuff RM are pretty price competitive. I'm not big enough to have a collection, so stuck with carting stuff to the 'local' small post office. Big stuff goes with UPS via interparcel.

[fusionframer]

Hi James,

We have the same type of contract with Royal Mail, where you use their Despatch Express software. We had a problem with the same thing, paying £500 for collection, but we got a friendly Account Manager over who said that if we said that our business was growing, then we would probably hit 5000 for the year and therefore they could waive the collection charge. In fact we are going to be short of that which I new we would at the time. The account manager new we would be short as well, but they are paid to keep RM accounts, so can do little favours like this. There has never been mention of a fee since, so I think once you are on a free collection, it should just continue.

Nick

[JamesC]

thanks all!

Nick especially because that's what I wanted to know most of all - do they ever waive the fee - ace!! We've just got to try and wangle it now! TBH I reckon we spend about £5k a year anyway, they were going off our last two months figures when they said we were close, but Xmas gets about 3 times as busy for two months.

Also thanks for the tips. Sendex seems interesting and worthy of investigation.

We do use interparcel or parcel2go, for international especially. We also got quite good rates from Fedex who we find to be excellent and reliable for sending larger items (everything is fully tracked).

It's posters in postal tubes and some other small non-fragile items we usually send RM (for the usual reason - cheaper and the customer can always collect from PO if not in).

Fastway are a franchise - problem is in our area (a sparsely populated one NE of York) they have been bust a few times within the last few years (from hearsay).

The new operator, when they arrive will usually honour your tickets but it is a risk as has been mentioned.

[fusionframer]

It is worth noting that on parcel2go on the international rates, they only advertise 3 day Fedex Shipping, but I use this a lot and it books it on the 24 hour international priority service (fully tracked) every time. Fedex gave me 50% discount for the International Priority Service, but I reckon that it is still cheaper to book through parcel2go and get the same service.

Good luck with RM, I think they are really keen to keep good accounts at the moment.