eBay appear to have cancelled .
Up until now professional printing companies have been saving Royal Mail PacketPost users the trouble of printing their own PPI labels and selling pre-printed PPI labels, with the customer’s own license number, on eBay.
PPI labels (which can also be printed directly onto envelopes) are technically worthless as they should be weighed, counted and then collected by Royal Mail, although doubtless they cause Royal Mail Revenue Protection Officers a nightmare to administrate. What should happen is when items are posted the weights and number of items are tallied up and the user then pays Royal Mail for the number of items sent. What’s all too easy is to slip an extra couple of parcels in, or to under declare the total weight thus reducing your overall bill.
That’s why recently Post Offices have started to reject PPI mail and Royal Mail are asking for paperwork with each collection, not just a total at the end of the day.
Regardless how much some users might play the system to reduce their bill, PPI mail always needs a PPI label. Just as it’s not economically viable for a business to print their own letterhead paper, it makes sense to pay a printer to produce your PPI labels. Most of the time they can print them for less than you could purchase the blank labels due to the larger numbers that they process. In fact Royal Mail recognise this and offer “download files to provide to your designer or printer“. Solutions such as Packing Partner from Aimco can also incorporate your PPI impression into their label printing.
So why are eBay banning PPI printing services? If someone is on the fiddle it certainly won’t stop them ripping off Royal Mail. However honest online retailers still need PPI labels for every parcel they legitimately send and pay for and someone somewhere has to print them.
I spoke to who have been granted permission to reproduce the Royal Mail Cruciform by the Royal Mail Group and who’s employees have been trained and authorised to print PPI labels. All of their eBay listings have been cancelled cutting off their income stream. Fortunately they have a website so if you need labels you can still purchase direct from PPI-Labels.co.uk, rather than eBay getting a slice of fees on the transaction.
There are rumours that there’s a new three year deal signed between eBay and Royal Mail, but we’ve no confirmation of this. Nor do we have any idea why a deal should include a ban on printing services. One would expect Royal Mail to approve of professional printing to ensure PPI labels are acceptable quality and machine readable. No one wants to return to the days of applying PPI via a hand stamp and ink pad, but that’s just what some Royal Mail customers may resort to.
If you have any more information on why the listings for PPI printing services have been removed by eBay we’d love to hear from you. In the mean time as mentioned earlier – you can use ANY printing service in the country to print your PPI Impressions with your license number and PPI-Labels.co.uk are standing by and more than happy to assist.
14 Responses
To stir some debate; possibly eBay is not the appropriate venue for such a service?
It would be revenue protection that check it at the sorting office, not the posty that collects it.
Every so often we get red x labels put on our bags and then this is checked randomly for problems.
Royal Mail then contact you to say either the weight is wrong or something (only if there is something wrong) for example in the last three months that have suddenly decided that some of our parcels are to large to send, products we have been selling for 4+ years.
Oddly enough they don’t contact you when it’s in their favour as we tried it the last time they red x us…..odd!
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There has been alot of talk around our area with the collect posties, who regularly find several PPI items randomly in letter boxes.
Some have been pulled from the system to check authenticity, but the vast majority just get through, possibly fraudulently.
One of the biggest frauds is double printing [or at least reprinting after download] of PPI, when purchased on Paypal.
As there is no additional paperwork, it is quite easy to fiddle.
Recently, I talked to an RM Manager & he said they estimated that over 50,000 items a day were going through their system with some sort of postal error, but as they were individual in their presence, & to stop the whole system would simply be uneconomical..
There is another point that I found, which is rather frighten & serious about PPI & I bought it to the attention of RM, but I will not say what it is here, as it could open up a large can of worms.
Instead I will email Chris & let him decide if it is worthy of publishing…..Standby Chris!!.
eBay clearly don’t have a clue about business accounts/PPI, or how the frauds are perpetrated within Royal Mail.
The removal of PPI labels from eBay is, in my opinion, a tactic to divert attention away from Royal Mail’s incompetence.
eBay get the negative publicity for ‘allowing’ the sales of PPI labels. Royal Mail on the other hand have been seen to have taken a decisive and swift action.
eBay, in removing the labels from sale, have fell for it.
My guess is that Ebay banned a particular PPI Labels seller because, alongside perfectly acceptable ppi labels, they were also flogging spoof recorded delivery labels with false barcodes. The idea is that you ‘enhance’ your mail with the spoof labels to kid customers that the mail has been tracked. This is said to significantly reduce the number of ‘item not received’ claims. A lot of Ebay sellers don’t want to pay extra for genuine recorded delivery postage.