E-commerce Delivery Methods?

[ttmw]

im looking into e-commerce and don't know anything about posting and have never posted a parcel in my life. I've looked into it a tiny bit and am just wondering how it works if you have loads of small items going out every day from your warehouse.

As i understand, you normally take the parcel to the post office, fill out some kind of form, and then have to wait to get proof of postage etc. But if you did this with a moderately large company you wouldn't have enough time in the day surely, so what are the other options for posting lots of items every day, is parcel force only for bigger items, and is there similar for small items where they get collected from your business instead of taking them yourself?

Thanks in advance.

[Blush]

Depends on the volumn of orders you have.Royal mail can collect.Also there are other couriers out there too.Just do a google search.

[Toon]

Again, it depends on ho many you're sending. We don't quite spend enough with Royal Mail to be elegible for their free pickup services so we have a deal with the post office just up the street where we take all parcels up to them and leave them. They then debit the card we gave them. So all we're doing is dropping the parcels off so a very quick in and out. The next day you pick up all of the receipts from the previous day.

[SillyJokes]

We get one or two pick ups a day and pay by average weight if parcels, but you need to be doing 5000+ parcels a year and the 'new' post office has made this harder and harder to achieve to be honest. You also get a discount.

http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/jump2?catId=400050&mediaId=600105

We also use couriers but have a large volume, so again no probs.

We did start off trogging to the village post office every day, but I don't think they'd thank us if we did that now.

[song3673]

DHL express have door to door serices as well!! i think.

[Steve2507]

We get one or two pick ups a day and pay by average weight if parcels, but you need to be doing 5000+ parcels a year and the 'new' post office has made this harder and harder to achieve to be honest. You also get a discount.

http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/jump2?catId=400050&mediaId=600105

We also use couriers but have a large volume, so again no probs.

We did start off trogging to the village post office every day, but I don't think they'd thank us if we did that now.Thats how we started out and pretty much how we do things now (we have 1 collection a day).

To have a free pick up by RM you need to spend £15,000 a year.

I would recomend you use RM at the start as you won't know what your levels are yet. But have a system set up where you can use an alternative for large deliveries.

[Christiane]

I used to go the PO until it got ridiculous and I had to use a trolley to carry my packages there. So I paid for the collection (less than £300 for the year) and it's given me lots more free time (erm work time!), well worth the money. And hopefully I'll be eligible for free collection by next year.

I also use interparcel for the odd heavier parcel.