Royal Mail Local Collect

[UrbanRetail]

Is anyone currently using or has used royal mails local collect service? or looked into it and decided against it for any reason?

Is it beneficial to your e-commerce business? Is the uptake very high?

Looking for some more information from businesses that are actually using it before I proceed.

Thanks, everyone!

 

[Mr D]

We used it for about 3 weeks once.
No problems with it. The van turned up sometime between 3 and 5 though usually done by 4.30.
It meant we had to stop our order packing about 1.30 and start processing the sacks - usually done in an hour but problems could delay us a little.
It was during quieter part of the year so don't know if they'd have sent a bigger van coming close to Christmas. Artic maybe...

It was actually a timesaver for us, despite the royal mail depot being almost on the way home. Paperwork, sacks loaded into van, gone - could take maybe 3 or 4 minutes.
But had to have everything ready by the time he turned up.

Requirement for free collection was at the time £15k spend a year. Can always get it done with collection paid for by you, that was around £15 a week off the top of my head. Probably a little more expensive now.

It was good - I'd use it again though I'm cheap enough to want it free unless my local post office shuts down or RM force me to use the service due to volume.

 

[npfmedia]

If you are processing a certain volume (profit dependant as well) it just isn’t worth it. Years ago I worked for a firm who upgraded to this eventually. Volume and convenience was the deciding factor.

We started off with 3-4 sacks of mail along with signed for ones being manually taken to the sorting office (it was so time consuming), kept getting busier and busier. Took forever queuing and filling in manual books.

Not sure on exact numbers but the time saved by using the OBA, providing the volume of orders satisfied, was enough to process more orders. The best day we had between six of us was 425 orders in one day. Few beers were had that night. If you know you are going to have a busy day you can ring ahead and prewarn the collection department you will need an extra van bringing, whether there is an extra charge I’m not sure.

We had a WeighAsYouGo system in place too and spreadsheet setup when our packaging numbers were above average. The person who ran the business was that forward thinking he designed a custom barcode based system so that, if a customer cancelled or wanted to add to an order that we had processed and was in a post bag, he knew so we could target that bag rather than go through every frikkin sack.

The OBA, providing the spreadsheet we filled in was correct, was easy to fill out. I would say about a handful of times it was out of order or being maintained, which was a pain but you would still I believe be able to print the paperwork off and it be accepted.

Hope this helps!

 

[williham]

Royal Mail local collect is where a customer can choose to pick up their order from a post office, we plan to start using it next year but haven’t used it yet.

 

[JamesAsh]

Hi UrbanRetail - sorry I can see this post was a long time ago. Was wondering if you ever pulled the trigger on Royal Mail Local Collect?

I'm looking into it at the moment - we've solved getting the post office locations onto a checkout but were wondering about correctly manifesting labels.

Cheers,
James