Alternatives to Royal Mail – myHermes

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14 Oct 2009

There’s little doubt that if Royal Mail and CWU don’t settle their differences that the pending industrial action will go ahead and the postal service grind to a halt. With that in mind all businesses reliant on Royal Mail need to consider alternatives and put contingency plans in place to ensure they can still get product to their customers. One such option is myHermes:

myHermes are owned by Hermes UK (formerly Parcelnet) who operate their own delivery network, delivering over 100 million parcels each year on behalf of some of the UK’s largest on-line retailers such as NEXT, Freemans and Grattons.

They have made significant investments in their network recently with a £10m national distribution hub in Nuneaton designed to handle even greater volumes of traffic with greater efficiency. Most significantly they have recently deployed Europe’s largest wireless rollout – some 7,500 hand-held terminals which means that their services are fully tracked from collection to customer signature, should they choose that option – live updates are also available on their website.

They operate a 0-15kg, 3-5 day door to door courier service which is a little slower than the Royal Mail, however their 7,500 ‘lifestyle’ couriers are very flexible and can deliver at convenient times such as in evenings and weekends when others can’t. This can eliminate the days of receiving drop cards and queuing in sorting offices on a weekend.

The service is very simple:

You choose the day you’d like myHermes to pick up your parcel (no need to take time away from your eBay business with trips to the post office)
Going out? Just enter a safe place where you’ve left your parcel(s) when you order
myHermes will make 3 attempts to deliver to your customer
Track it on-line
myHermes also offer the UK’s cheapest door to door parcel delivery service with prices starting £3.99 for 0-2kg.