Why I use Royal Mail (RM)
As a small business I love Royal Mail, it offers me a low-cost way of sending my products to my customers and includes insurance! The majority of the items I send are in a large letter and weigh under 100g. If you are sending anything larger than this then blog post probably won’t be any help – sorry!
Up until November 2022 I was sending all my items via 1st Class Signed For, as a requirement by Etsy is that all orders over £10 in value must be sent using a tracked service. This service offers insurance of £50 so that more than covers my materials costs for most orders. I adopted the same postage option for my website and Amazon store for ease of shipping mainly but also to give both me and my customers peace of mind knowing when their order has been delivered.
The Royal Mail strikes in late 2022 seemed to suggest that 1st Class Signed for was not treated as a priority, in my experience and that of many other small businesses I spoke to. I am guessing this is because most business customers use Tracked 24 or 48. And since Royal Mail are keen to be in the ‘Courier Bandwagon’ they are trying to keep their business customers sweet. Unfortunately every day folk are just not using Royal Mail anymore. I found that my orders was taking around 9 working days to arrive.
When the strikes were announced for December 2022 I decided to upgrade all my customers 1st Class Signed For postage to Tracked 48. It was 35p more expensive but as it is scanned through the system it would allow customers to see that their order was on its way. I also saw that these were being delivered within 3 and 4 working days, again confirming to me that ‘Business tariffs’ were being prioritised. It also offers insurance of £100 so I could confidently send larger orders too with no worry.
I hadn’t really considered Tracked 24 or 48 as a service before as I had to take them to my local sorting office and any time I had done this in the past I was met with a confused face, items were not scanned and staff didn’t seem to know what to do with them. Although items did arrive I wasn’t very confident that it was a seamless process. I much prefer handing my orders to the lovely people at the Post Office who swapped them for pieces of paper as my proof of postage should I need to make a claim.
It is my suspicion that Royal Mail may look to streamline their postage options, give priority to business post who, quite understandably, are now their bread and butter. I imagine over the next few years we will see the likes of ‘1st class post’ and ‘daily postie deliveries’ resigned to the history books with everything being ‘couriered’ wherever it needs to go.
If this is the case as a small business I needed to research my alternatives.
So who are the alternatives?
Evri
The closest alternative in the same price bracket is Evri… Or is it? Their postable option maybe 1p cheaper than RM Tracked 48 however as they don’t include any insurance the service is not really comparable. Interestingly Evri also seem to think that Royal Mail don’t offer free tracking on their tracked services although the name would suggest otherwise.
If I want to use Evri with insurance the next option is to send my items as parcels, my tiny C6 boxes (16 x 11 x 2cm) are competing with parcels up to 15kg that are 120cm long and 245cm wide! And although prices are ‘From £2.99’ when you go through and book you see how these prices jump when you need things like insurance over £20 or a signature on delivery.
And there is the reputation to contend with. Despite the Hermes re-branding to Evri in March 2022 it will take a lot of work to lose the stigma of items left in bins and chucked over garden walls – although the Amazon guys might be eyeing up that accolade now. When I told my customers I would be offering Evri as an alternative to Royal Mail during the strikes it did not go down well, of course no one really bothers to say when things go right so it’s hard to gauge just how bad they really are.
For the record, my local Evri bloke is THE BEST! He is such a nice bloke, knows that I sometimes take a few minutes to get to the door so doesn’t just lob the box and bugger off, and always has a treat for my dog. He’s a real credit to the company (in case they are reading this!).
Yodel
Now I have to be honest here and confess that I hadn’t looked into Yodel as much as Evri before sitting down to write this blog. 2 reasons; 1 because I’ve never had the same delivery driver twice for Yodel and they always just ring my doorbell and drive off (much like Amazon) and 2 because the nearest drop off point for me isn’t on my route to or from school drop off.
Not very good reasons I know and looking at them a little more closely I can see that they do offer a cheaper and better priced service than Evri. They offer insurance of up to £50 included for £2.79 but again this jumps up if you want a signature on delivery. Again their minimum parcel size for this service is 60 x 50 x 50cm and up to 2kg so my tiny boxes could easily get lost.
Amazon Shipping
As you may guess these are not someone I would really consider for my orders, although at least they are postable so less likely to end up in a hedge. But to get prices you need to ‘Request Information’ and as anyone selling on Amazon will know that will probably mean a bazillion emails about all the services they can offer. No doubt once I got through their vetting system my measly £9k ish I spend on postage each year won’t be of interest.
I therefore don’t know what their pricing is like so I can’t really say if they are an alternative to Royal Mail or not, I’ve only included them here because they sometimes post things through my door so I am guessing they may have a ‘postable’ delivery option.
Please feel free to let me know in the comments if you are or have used them, I’d love to get an idea of their prices – I will update this blog if I do.
And…
Well there isn’t really anyone else in the same price bracket… The next option is couriers and in a previous life I did a LOT of research into parcel couriers. This was many moons ago and the field is certainly a lot smaller these days with the likes of TNT and CityLink having been bought out.
There is DPD Local but with their prices starting from £6.47 including vat for Shop to Customer delivery they aren’t really a contender. Which is a real shame as I have always liked DPD.
I do use UPS for my deliveries to Ireland and they collect from my door so they are my favourite of the big couriers. Unfortunately since Brexit sending mail to Ireland has become quite difficult via Royal Mail. Ireland has implemented their own tariff system and if your item has the wrong tariff code it is returned. It’s hard enough remembering all the codes for the international deliveries let alone remembering to use a different code when sending to Ireland but I digress…
What’s the decision?
Well for now I am offering my customers the choice – Royal Mail or Evri. My plan is to run these against each other until Royal Mail makes a decision about their employees wages and conditions. I’ll let my customers decide which they prefer. I may decide in a few weeks to add or switch to Yodel but I am hoping for a speedy resolution to the situation with Royal Mail.
I would be so sad to see Royal Mail go, it’s such an institution! The majority of the staff are awesome and love their jobs, I mean they wouldn’t be striking if they didn’t, surely! Plus they still work as if the company is publicly owned, as a service to the country. They worked tirelessly through the national lock-downs making sure we could still send things to friends and family. Such a vital service when we couldn’t even be in the same room as them! Many small businesses just like mine flourished and grew during this time which seems incredible to look back on now.
Deliveries from many other companies were haphazard and unreliable, as their couriers are self-employed; if they had to isolate during the pandemic then there was generally no one to cover their routes. Or people were drafted in from out of the area and it could be days before you found your parcel behind your neighbours wheel arch (true story!).
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Are you a Royal Mail fan or would you rather they just died a little quieter? Which courier do you use and would you recommend them? Drop me a comment below, I read them all!