There aren’t many really useful new apps that come along, but today I found one which really is a time saver. Available for the iPhone, the UK Postage App from Aspire Associates looks pretty good and if you’ve got an iPhone the tiny £1.99 that the app costs looks like money well spent.
Every UK online retailer will doubtless use Royal Mail’s services at some point, even if you use couriers for the bulk of your transactions. The UK Postage app is designed to get you the postage cost for your parcel faster and more conveniently than by using the Royal Mail website.
All the updates for the UK Postage iPhone App are free (this includes updates to pricing and services as and when the Royal Mail publishes the details). When the latest prices came into effect the update was available for users a day before the new prices went live.
Ed who wrote the app told us “There are quite a few postage calculators available and before writing my own I did try out several of the others. They all do pretty much the same thing in that you can find a postage price. But somehow none of them seemed to have a workflow that fitted in with how I work when I am pricing listings and most were not comprehensive enough. They all looked very pretty but it seemed to me that maybe they had been designed by designers and programmers rather than someone that actually has to deal with shipping items on a day to day basis. Hence I wrote my own version – mainly to make my life easier!“.
Suffice to say the app appears to be pretty popular and feedback from several volume eBay sellers is that it’s easy to use and helpful. You can download the Aspire Associates UK Postage iPhone App from iTunes
Royal Mail services included in the UK Postage App
– 1st & 2nd Class (with “Recorded” Signed For option)
– Special Delivery (next day / next day + Sat / 9am / 9am + Sat) + Additional compensation amounts.
– Standard Royal Mail Parcel.
– Airmail (with International signed for option).
– Surface Mail.
– AIRSURE (including option for enhanced compensation).
– Franked Prices for both UK and International Post where applicable (for business users that have access to a franking machine or equivalent business user discount)
– Support for Small Packet & Printed Papers (as Printed Papers sometimes have different weight limits)
– Quick access lists detailing lists of Countries for WorldZone 1, WorldZone 2 and Europe.
– Quick access list giving details of which Countries offer a signature for International Tracking.
– Size guide for dimensions of Letter, Large Letter and Packet.
4 Responses
Yes, it’s much better than Royal Mails website…Royal Mail need to understand that consumers want to know prices and tracking…nothing else. Australia Post and USPS are particularly good postal websites
What I want is an app that you can set up and when the weight is entered provides all the prices that you require on one screen without any further page scrolling or swiping.
Say up to 10 different shipping types on one result screen (2nd, 2nd recorded, 1st, 1st recorded, airmail europe, airmail europe signed for, airmail elsewhere, airmail elsewhere signed for, special delivery, standard parcels)
And the set up and results page includes all additional overhead such as packaging costs, shipping payment fees, franking machine costs and so on to give you a gross figure.
I have looked at them all and nothing offers this. All I want to do is plonk whatever figures come up straight into my listings.
Have I missed any app that does this?
its a bit like using a sat nav for your daily trip to work and back that you could do in your sleep, we know the costs of royal mail its the other shipping an courier co,s that we use on occasion that we need an app for something like confused dot com that gives an independent price quote across the market