Royal Mail has beaten it’s quality of service targets in the first quarter of the 2014-2015 financial year, for both 1st and 2nd Class mail.
93.3% of First Class mail was delivered the next working day (against a target of 93%) and 99% of Second Class mail was delivered within 3 working days (target of 98.5%).
It’s worth noting that Royal Mail is the only UK mail delivery company required to publish quality of service performance against delivery targets every quarter.
The interesting part of the Royal Mail delivery targets (and achievements) is that 2nd Class post is much more likely to arrive on time than 1st Class mail. That means as far as eBay delivery expectations of 2-3 days for 2nd Class you can be pretty confident it’ll arrive on time, whereas 6.7% of 1st Class post was delivered late according to eBay’s next day expectation.