Best Postage Solutions For Small E-Commerce Store Selling UK & Overseas

Royal mail, their new online portal is excellent and never had an issue with deliveries

 

Their customer service is no better than before privatisation, they don`t seem bothered about gaining any business, not if it means they actually have to put themselves out.

 

I use Yodel and when you set up an account you get assigned an account manager, I find that you can negotiate with these for a better rate especially for over seas

 

I'd do RM OBA and Click and Drop all day long. they've made the process really easy and intuitive. I ship both RM24 and RM48. If you send more than 20 parcels a day you'll get volume discounts.

 

We use royal mail 2nd class like you. £2.90 for a parcel does seem steep when you are sending multiple parcels to the same location. It's cheaper for us to send 4 parcels individually than to send them as 1 large parcel. That seems wrong to me ...

 

My supplier has developed a shipping solution with DPD in the UK. Maybe that can help you?

 

As others have said for small volume international shipments at speed, a service like Parcelmonkey or similar would be best until you get volume. Our rates to the USA are cheaper with UPS on a 2 day service than with Royal Mail (signed) but we do have volume discounts.

 

I can't wait until autonomous drones do this haha!

 

Set up a Royal mail OBA account. This is a very cheap option, prices are worked out on average weight. You simply frank them yourself and bag them up. It will take a bit of trial and error to find your way around it but it works well. If you use the Click and drop functionality then they also means to link to various common ecommerce CMS for easy import of order details.

Once you start getting to larger items, especially international shipping then you would probably want to use a different courier. Generally speaking for an ecommerce site you would set up accounts with several couriers to manage costs for different services.

 

Now this bit is good advice I need to start applying!

 

Or a single provider that will grant you access to discounted rates from a range of carriers, with a single monthly invoice

 

Royal mail or hermes but hermes can be hard work sometimes

 

Our customer base (we're an Order Management software solution provider) tend to use Royal Mail and Hermes. From the feedback we've received, these both seem to provide an excellent balance between price and service level. Check them out.

 

Ask for Discounts, DHL may also help if you set a certain minimum number of packages per day/week

 

Interparcel are also a very popular broker for many different couriers. Worth a look.

 

Bearing in mind the OP asked his question back in 2015...he probably couldn't hang around for this latest input ;-)

 

Parcel2Go is a really good parcel-broker service - covers all the major couriers and many I've never heard of. Used to use Hermes all the time now I always go to this site first. I usually go with whoever is offering the fastest and most economical service, always choose signed for and insured, and have never been let down yet

 

I use Royal mail tracked & signed for international (EU Only) mail, find them extremly fast and reliable getting the items to customers very quickly. I do have a business account with them and printer to print my own labels but find it a pain at times. Been let down by other so called couriers.

 

UPS have been excellent for our international shipments, however, after speaking with Royal Mail the Tracked service is actually much faster than the Tracked and Signed service. We shipped a lot of items to the USA, and one major problem with Tracked and Signed was when the customers were out, so they had to leave a card (which I don't think they did) and the item was never collected so returned to sender.
We stopped using Tracked and Signed and switched to the International Tracked service, which resulted in more deliveries being made, less return to senders, and no item not received reports so win-win.

 

Take a look at Parcel2Go who aggregate their clients needs and get cheaper rates from the major providers