Alternative to Royal Mail

[JayRidesBikes]

Looking for an alternative to Royal Mail (if there is one..).

We're currently shipping around 300-400 large letter size packages weekly, via Royal Mail. For years we simply used second class service as practically everything arrived on time and we had hardly any issues. Fast forward to now and we're using a mix of tracked 24 and 48, and are experiencing loss rates of just under 5% at the moment.

I've contacted Royal Mail regarding the persistent losses and simply get advised to make a claim, which to me seems like they are aware that they're sh*t and won't do anything about it.

So, we're currently using Evri, via Shopify and we're getting fully tracked 2-3 delivery for £2.48. I've only been trialling this for the last few days but they haven't lost anything (yet) and it's cheaper than Royal Mail.

I'm just curious if anyone has any recommendations for an alternative to Evri or RM which won't kill me on price?

[ZedLeg]

There’s no one else I know of that would get close to that price. I’m surprised at that loss rate tbh. We ship around 3000 parcels a week with RM and our loss rate is less than 1%. Customer service with RM is st though, our rep will just ghost us for weeks at a time.

We pay less than £2.50 per parcel for a tracked 48 service though. We recently moved our special delivery service to dpd after they beat RMs price by about £1.50 per parcel.

[JayRidesBikes]

ZedLeg said:

There’s no one else I know of that would get close to that price. I’m surprised at that loss rate tbh. We ship around 3000 parcels a week with RM and our loss rate is less than 1%. Customer service with RM is st though, our rep will just ghost us for weeks at a time.

We pay less than £2.50 per parcel for a tracked 48 service though. We recently moved our special delivery service to dpd after they beat RMs price by about £1.50 per parcel.

I didn't think anyone would get close, but an Evri account manager contacted me and advertised their loss rate at 1%, so it can't be any worse than what we're experiencing now with RM.

With our tracked 24 + 48 they collect from our premises and then as far as I am aware it goes directly to the distribution centre in Birmingham. The part I don't understand is that we bag all of our tracked mail in the same sack but only a portion of it gets scanned into the PDA it would seem. 95% of the items are scanned in, tracking goes live and then usually gets delivered (only very few packages fail delivery once they are scanned into the network) however the 5% that we are losing seem to be collected from us and then vanish.. the tracking always states 'sender preparing item', despite being collected.

I've spoken about this with RM who don't seem to see a problem with this, which is the frustrating part as clearly something is going wrong here for so many packages to simply not be scanned in.

[foliedouce]

We use Evri and have a 3% loss rate via them

[mattyprice4004]

My loss rate with Hermes was always around 2% - quite consistently.
Oddly with Royal Mail (parcels and large letters) it's now about 1.5%.

[BorkBorkBork]

We moved from Royal Mail to Evri late last year. We’re losing less than 1%. It’s better than Royal Mail in terms of losses, and it’s also considerably cheaper per parcel.

[cheekymeerkat]

Wow, pre-pandemic our loss rate was 1 in 300 (0.3%) with Royal Mail LL's.

What is going on??

[ZedLeg]

JayRidesBikes said:

ZedLeg said:

There’s no one else I know of that would get close to that price. I’m surprised at that loss rate tbh. We ship around 3000 parcels a week with RM and our loss rate is less than 1%. Customer service with RM is st though, our rep will just ghost us for weeks at a time.

We pay less than £2.50 per parcel for a tracked 48 service though. We recently moved our special delivery service to dpd after they beat RMs price by about £1.50 per parcel.

I didn't think anyone would get close, but an Evri account manager contacted me and advertised their loss rate at 1%, so it can't be any worse than what we're experiencing now with RM.

With our tracked 24 + 48 they collect from our premises and then as far as I am aware it goes directly to the distribution centre in Birmingham. The part I don't understand is that we bag all of our tracked mail in the same sack but only a portion of it gets scanned into the PDA it would seem. 95% of the items are scanned in, tracking goes live and then usually gets delivered (only very few packages fail delivery once they are scanned into the network) however the 5% that we are losing seem to be collected from us and then vanish.. the tracking always states 'sender preparing item', despite being collected.

I've spoken about this with RM who don't seem to see a problem with this, which is the frustrating part as clearly something is going wrong here for so many packages to simply not be scanned in.

Yeah, RM have never scanned all our parcels at collection. When we were smaller we would send our stuff out in sealed grey sacks. Now we use the big liner bags for yorks that can also be zipped closed and sealed before they’re loaded. Fortunately the amount we’ve lost before they’re scanned has been negligible.