Royal Mail Bulk Discounts

[OnlineSelling123]

Hi Everyone,

I'm wondering if anyone on here has 'Special' pricing from Royal Mail and what sort of rates they get? Obviously this is quite sensitive information so i'm not asking for exact details but more examples of whats achievable in regards to getting Royal Mail prices down...

I'm not talking about PPI and Franking or Sorting for discounts as this is pretty standard these days. The reason i'm asking is because some Ebay sellers doing decent volumes i.e. 500-5000 orders per day seem to be getting extremely cheap postage. I know its possible they are working on ridiculous margins and buying high volume etc.... but we are talking about many sellers across the board..

Without naming any sellers in particular, after checking company accounts for these sellers it seems they aren't doing badly either.

For example, there are loads of products available for around 2 pound on Ebay. These are too big for Large letters so how are people profiting as the cheapest rate for a parcel is around 1.90 plus VAT!

Its not just one or two sellers doing this though, there is tons of them!

Any advice anyone?

Thanks,
Mark

 

[Chris34]

Buy one of the products in question and then see what service they give, do they try and up-sell after the sale, how does the parcel arrive, check the stamp to see what Royal Mail service they are using and what business service they are using.

That's the only way you are going to get a clearer picture of what's happening, anything else is just guesswork.

Chris.

 

[brc]

I know a seller who is quite large I actually import some items for him that he then sells online and once by chance I came across one of this listings and found that there was no way he could send the item out due to its size for the amount he was charging for the whole item, I asked him about this and he said that they work on a average system with Royal Mail, so they simply work out the amount of items they are shipping each day, the average weight and also the average break down of what it is ie letters, large letters, parcels....and becasue there average always works out to a large letter the small parcels they ship also get charges at the large letter rate, sounded a bit strange but I heard the very same thing from someone else once so there must be a way of doing it as people are!

In order for this to work you need a very big volume tho.

 

[grgzy]

I know a seller who is quite large I actually import some items for him that he then sells online and once by chance I came across one of this listings and found that there was no way he could send the item out due to its size for the amount he was charging for the whole item, I asked him about this and he said that they work on a average system with Royal Mail, so they simply work out the amount of items they are shipping each day, the average weight and also the average break down of what it is ie letters, large letters, parcels....and becasue there average always works out to a large letter the small parcels they ship also get charges at the large letter rate, sounded a bit strange but I heard the very same thing from someone else once so there must be a way of doing it as people are!

In order for this to work you need a very big volume tho.

Very interesting how that works out, I wonder what sort of volumes he must be posting out.

 

[JMRidley]

This is how our Royal Mail business account works - we bag up the orders and the postage is based on the average weight of parcels that day which means some heavy parcels go quite cheaply if there are enough lighter ones to balance it out. This is a fairly standard royal mail account - I think the minimum is about 2,000 parcels per year.

 

[Jayser100]

The only way to fully maximise discounts with RM is to do the 100% packet sort, which basically means separating your parcels down to the level of individual countries. For most this simply isn't viable. The only other way to get cheaper RM rates is to use a third-party mail company like Future Pro Logistics Ltd. They do the full sort, giving them discounts which they share with their trade customers. We are just starting up with them and their prices are cheaper than we currently pay RM for standard PPI. They have the added advantage that they don't exclusively use RM for packet delivery abroad, and in the US they offer a massive discount at £2.50 per packet as opposed to £8.00!