Royal Mail has extended acceptance times for Tracked 24 and Tracked 48 products at their National Distribution Centre in Northampton, They now accept parcels from retailers as late as 11.30pm for next day or two day delivery.
One of the first brands to make use of the later acceptance times is Joules, Royal Mail have just won a one year contract to delivery their fashion and home ware products. The later acceptance time was key to Royal Mail being selected as Joules’ delivery partner. Customers are able to place online orders with Joules until 8pm for delivery by Royal Mail the next working day.
Nick Landon, Managing Director Royal Mail Parcels, said: “We are delighted that Joules has become one of the first brands to fully make use of the later acceptance times at our national distribution centre. We take customer service just as seriously as Joules, and as their chosen delivery partner we are committed to delivering their brand promise on their behalf.”
With consumers expecting ever later cut off times two things are key. One is carriers like Royal Mail accepting parcels later in the evening and the second is for the retailer to be close enough to the carrier’s hub so that the parcels can be delivered by the cut off time.
If you’re a large retailer who wishes to extend your next day cut off time and are close enough to Northampton for your parcels to be dropped off by 11.30pm, speak to your Royal Mail rep about their later acceptance times.
3 Responses
This is fine if you are a large company.
Small businesses get treated very differently with a “like it or lump it” attitude.
In Royal Mails most recent attemps to save money they condensed all the collections around our route into one and brought forward our collection time by 30 minutes, this makes a massive difference to our operation and they do not give a hoot.
We have an account manager because we spend over £100K and yet we cannot get the collection time we want, we used to get collections at around 5PM and now it can be as early as 4:20PM, which makes our lives so much harder, we are maintaining our 4PM cut off because we do not want to it to impact on our bottom line but it makes it very hard work to get the last orders done and out the door in 20 minutes, we used to have an hour after cut off.
If there was an alternative for Large letter items i would have switched provider over the cut off times.
We are now hitting Amazon FBA much harder so Royal Mail are the ones that will suffer because of their cost cutting and silly cut off times for our collection.