Deferred e-commerce delivery solutions - Q & A
Who should you be targeting and how big is the market?
Q. Who uses registered (tracked) post and why?
A. E commerce customers sending out relatively light items where the customer is prepared to wait several days for delivery, rather than pay for a premium service but where the sender still wants tracking. The requirement for tracking can be as much to do with proof of despatch and enabling recipients to do their own tracking, both of which avoids customer services calls as much as needing the final signature. Anything expensive or wanted quickly tends to go on a next day or 1 to 2 day service where registered post wouldn’t work.
Q. So does anyone use registered mail if it takes more than a couple of days?
A. Yes, there is a huge market for registered post particularly as a low cost alternative to Rest of World destinations which still provides tracking to the recipient, evidencing despatch, whilst they wait patiently.
Q So can I switch someone from say DPD ‘s European parcel service to a registered postal service as a much lower cost alternative?
A No, you would be asking for problems on transit times so not recommended unless the customer is prepared for extended transit times. If a prospect is using an economy road service it should be possible to switch them to our service.
About registered mail?
Q. What are the expected transit times?
A. Royal Mails transit aims are 2-5 days (working days) in near Europe 3-5 days to the rest of Europe and 5-7 (working days) to rest of world (so over a week in reality to RoW)
Q. Does Royal Mail offer a tracked and signature service to all countries?
A. No nor can we. There are some countries (see list) where the postman doesn’t attempt to get a signature. However with Royal Mail all of the EU has a tracked and signature service available with end-to-end tracking, signature and on line delivery confirmation. The just Tracked service offers tracking at five points as well as on line confirmation of delivery but no signature, the International Signed goes silent after the UK until a signature is received.
A. No, there is a list of restricted items, similar to other carriers, which you can google.
Insurance?
Q. Does Royal Mails “tracked” and “tracked & signature” services offer insurance cover?
A. Yes, standard cover with Royal Mail is £50 for the signature service and £100 for tracked
Q. Do we offer insurance?
A. We would credit the delivery cost. Overall about half a percent of parcels go missing, or one in 200 so theoretically one would need to put aside 25p/item to self-insure up to the value of £50. However, if your customer is Chelsea Football club and that’s advertised on their packaging then don’t offer any insurance!
Q. Does Royal Mail offer extra insurance?
A. Yes for £2.40 they offer an extra £200 cover making it totally £250 for registered and £300 for tracked. If the 1 in 200 assumption is correct then Royal Mail gets £480 worth of premiums per £200 claim and breakeven would be one claim in every 83.3 mailings or 1.2 claims per 100. Of course Royal Mail would only pay out the cost value of any item. U-PIC charge 25p/£100 cover for the major carriers which means they must be experiencing less than one claim per 400 shipments or less than 0.25 claims per 100, dependant on their average claim value, if on average they only pay out £50 then we are back to our 1 claim in 200.
What platform do we use and what does it offer?
Q. Is this service on Webship?
A. No not yet but we have an InXpress branded platform that your clients can use.
Q. Does the platform produce the bar coded address label?
A. Yes and there is also an integrated CN22 customs declaration within the label
Q. Is our platform able to take csv uploads and is it integrated with any shopping channels?
A. Yes, and there is also a text alert available if you customer can provide mobile numbers or e mail addresses.
Q. Does Royal Mail offer a similar platform for the generation of registered mail labels?
A. Yes, to its larger customers of the service.
Q. Does the platform offer just postal solutions?
A. No we also offer a range of carrier options and, again, your clients can produce the final mile tracking label in their warehouse.
Q. Do you have an API document and how long should we advise our customers it will take to connect up the API link?
A. Yes we have an APLI document and a skilled programmer should be able to make the connection in a few hours but realistically to complete testing etc. will generally take a couple of days.
How does the service work?
Q. How does our service work?
A. We are using a combination of blue chip EU postal authorities namely Sweden Post, Belgium Post, Deutsche Post and parcel carriers such as DHL, UPS, GLS. AM Post, & DPD.
A. We have two hybrid European services one which is a 100% signature service and one which is mainly tracked & signature and tracked without signature to some of the lesser destinations.
A. We then offer two fully postal services, tracked and untracked.
Q. Will transit times be as good as Royal Mail’s?
A. Our service might be a day behind because of feeding into our facility overnight but because postal delivery happens over a series of days after the day of posting, rather than after a specific low number of days, it shouldn’t be too noticeable.
Q. Are there any other registered services we can offer?
A. Yes, we can offer an even lower cost registered mail service via Hungarian Post but because of the transit time needed to inject the items it’s only used where cost is everything, and delivery time isn’t important.
Q. Is registered mail always the cheapest way of accessing the EU for light weight traffic?
A. Not always. That’s why we use a hybrid service which is a combination of registered mail and non- postal tracked parcel delivery services which for certain weigh items and destinations creates the definitive low cost e commerce solution for your clients.