Royal Mail have just launched a new microsite – Royal Mail International Business, aimed at helping businesses sell internationally, either from or to the UK. They highlight on main reasons for expanding a UK business internationally – The relative weakness of the pound. On eBay simply adding shipping options to existing eBay UK listings is working well for many sellers, although specifically listing on eBay.com, eBay.de and other countries will increase sales even further.
There is a plenty of good information on the International Business pages, although they also include Royal Mail products and services. For our non-UK readers there’s also a service I wasn’t aware of to help you sell into the UK. It’s possible to access all Royal Mail services via the local postal operator in most countries. With Direct Entry into the UK you get the same exactly the same terms, conditions and prices as a UK customer and your mail will look like it originated in the UK.
This same service is available for UK based businesses who want their mail to look like it originated in overseas countries such as the US for example.
16 Responses
if Royalmail could use an Atlas we would be happy
they recently sent a package to Lebanon Rather than Malaysia
and cost us £400
With Direct Entry into the UK you get the same exactly the same terms, conditions and prices as a UK customer and your mail will look like it originated in the UK.
How does that work if your package has incurred a customs charge on the way?
As soon as overseas mail operators stop losing the parcels I send to non UK customers, then I may consider selling overseas again.
What’s the point of setting up a great starting point where it begins to fail as soon as the parcel leaves the UK?
100% of overseas orders I have issued in the last 2 months have failed to arrive according to the recipients.
I work for aspecialty health products company in Florida, and we use the US Postal Service’s Express Mail International and Priority Mail International services to ship to UK customers. Our parcels generally arrive in a timely manner with no problems. One advantage of the Royal Mail website is that you can plug in the USPS Express Mail International tracking number into their site and it will give you the equivalent Royal Mail parcel number and its location (depot), which is very helpful.
We do not pay the GST/HST in advance… …we have no way to know what it is before we ship it, and the UK customers pay that on arrival, which we understand can be a hefty 40% or so. This is the only problem.
We do not recommend anyone shipping to Italy, as one poster commented. We had 3 parcels lost there in the last 6 months, even though they were insured, it took weeks and weeks to get them resolved. There is some kind of rampant parcel delivery issue with ITALY so we removed Italy as a shipping destination.
Cheers.