12.05hrs Edited to add:Despatch Manager is back online
Royal Mail spokeswoman Akudo Ike said:
“Royal Mail is sorry that technical issues meant that our online shipping tool, Despatch Manager Online, was unavailable to customers for about an hour earlier today. We worked hard to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and have now restored the online application. We would like to sincerely apologise to customers for any inconvenience this has caused.”
Original Story
On what’s possibly the busiest day of the year for shipping, Royal Mail Despatch Manager Online has gone down.
Despatch Manager Online is the online solution Royal Mail provide for large merchants to ship products and purchase postage. Any retailer who uses Royal Mail Tracked services or similar is likely to use it. As well as giving access to provides access to address verification it’s also the software which prints out the “stamp” for a variety of Royal Mail services including Royal Mail Tracked Services, Special Delivery, 1st/2nd Class Recorded Signed For as well as International Signed For and Airsure.
Currently we don’t know how long the service will be down for, so the only advice we can give if you’ve got parcels piling up to post is start shipping those going by courier services first. The chances are that Royal Mail will get the services back up and running soon, but be prepared for a couple of hours when you can’t despatch products due to be posted by mail today.
5 Responses
Wasn’t it last Chrismas time (not perhaps as close to the big day as now) that RM had trouble with their online systems too?
Not fit for purpose? Or just likely to crack under the strain of a busy day?
Dan
Its back online now (11:50am)
The fact is it was down from 9.30am till 11.50am – that is not 1 hour! They can’t even bring themselves round to admit the downtime. Embarrassing to say the least.
I saw the headline and felt this should be noted as we Brits love to knock. We called there online help line as we could not log to DMO and the telephone was answered straight away no wait what so ever, a very helpful operative explained the problem and then took our email to inform us when the service was up and running again and as to her word an email arrived 1 hour later to say back on line. I would imagine if you asked the head of DMO what’s your worst nightmare he would say this was it and they handled it impeccably
As a company we use all the Royal Mail services sending 1,000 Parcels world wide a week and there service is second to none on cost and service.
I phoned them and they were very apologetic. They said they would call me when it was up and running.
In fairness they did.
BUT I have loads of issues with their software. I import my addresses through excel.
It falls over if the space is missing in the postcode or if there is a 0 where there should be a o.
Both of these things could be easily resolved.
I have to manually remove all accents or foreign letters. I can’t deal with Russian or Greek addresses.
I have to go through all the addresses and move them around as it is only possible to fit a few characters on each line. This is a major problem with foreign addresses as the end of each line is chopped off and foreign addresses usually have the number at the end.
I asked them if they could make the font smaller of in lower case but they said no.
All very frustrating. They have no plans to resolve any of the issues. I wish I could speak to their IT director. Maybe Chris could put me in touch……