Royal Mail have recognised the growing importance of Australia to ecommerce within the UK and added the continent as a destination for their Airsure tracked international service. They report seeing a 19% year on year rise in packets sent from the UK to Austrlia.
This is no surprise to eBay sellers, eBay has been giving visibility for products listed on eBay UK on eBay Australia for some time and I know many sellers who regularly ship to Australia – It’s an easy country to deal with, despite the distance, as of course it’s main language is also English.
Royal Mail’s latest Delivery Matters report (opens in .pdf) reveals that online tracking is increasingly important to consumers with 80% of the UK’s online shoppers like to receive updates at every stage of delivery. However to balance this only 67% said that free delivery was the most important delivery factor – that’s dropped from 73% in 2010.
Robert Woods, Royal Mail’s Head of International Products, said: “Tt is essential that we support UK e-retailers to continually improve the online shopping experience for overseas customers” adding “We have responded to the demand from Australian shoppers for UK goods by extending our fully tracked international service to the country”.
To help UK retailers better meet the delivery needs of the growing number of online shoppers from Australia, Royal Mail has extended its international tracked service, Airsure® to the area, flying into four major gateways to ensure fast delivery across the country.
Airsure provides full tracking from posting to delivery. Items receive priority handling while travelling through a secure network in the UK and abroad. This allows shoppers to track and follow the progress of the item up to the point when it’s delivered.
If you’re not already making your products on marketplaces and on your website available to Australia then it’s time to start doing so.
5 Responses
Airsure to Australia has been available since 2 April.
The best thing about Airsure though is destination countries postal services don’t change the tracking reference so a package posted from the UK to Aus for example can be tracked using the same reference number on the destination country’s postal service site.
Example:
Ref: LQ244900595GB
https://track.royalmail.com
shows it’s arrived in Melbourne and is being processed for delivery but…
https://auspost.com.au/track/
shows it was delivered on 12 April.
Handy to have for those INR chancers… 😉
Does anyone know if the tracking on Aus Post works for Airsure.
We use “international signed for” for Australia and the tracking RARELY works properly and we have to enquire to auspost as to where the parcel is and invariably get a response saying it’s waiting at their local sorting office. If we could get that information from the online tracking it would save me and the customer waiting 2 days for the information.
We use Royal Mail International Signed for for ANYTHING outside the UK. This is mainly due to (for the moment) NOT being charged VAT on INT Signed and being charged VAT on Airsure. Also AIRSURE is only available to a selected number of countries wheras Int Signed is available everywhere (in theory).
ttfn
Simon
Simon,
Airsure is fully trackable on Aus Post website. It is in theory on the plane the evening you post it. It’s well worth the slightly extra cost, and it will reduce the amount of claims and customer enquiries. The best delivery time from uk to Aus for me is 3 days door to door. Average is 5.
You can get a contract service with royal mail using despatch manager online – will lower your price. Volume levels apply.
John
If you’re using Airsure as a Royal Mail contract customer it’s now actually cheaper than International Signed For. Just 5p less but cheaper nonetheless and much quicker.
Thankyou.
We have an OBA with Royal Mail and use PPI for everything.
I am sure the last time I looked at airsure we had to pay VAT on it which is why we used International signed for.
I just tried the airsure option on the OBA and it didn’t come up with vat so i’ll try it all later.
As far as I could see a 20 GRAM packet is still apx 20p more expensive using Airsure than Int signed for to Aus.
If it stops the MOANING and the lost parcel I had yesterday (Thanks for the mis information Aus post the customer didn’t think it funny that she was informed that she might have a 16 hour drive to collect her parcel that turned out to be lost)
Thanks again
Simon