Royal Mail beg retailers to forecast Christmas volumes

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Royal Mail announces latest Christmas posting dates for business account customers to ensure orders arrive in time for Christmas Day. They’ve already previously announced the last postage dates for consumers.

Royal Mail Business Account Customers Last Posting Dates for Christmas 2016

The latest recommended posting date for Royal Mail 48 and 2nd Class Royal Mail Business Mail is Tuesday 20 December 2016.

This is followed by Royal Mail Tracked 48, Royal Mail 24 and 1st Class Royal Mail Business Mail on Wednesday 21 December 2016.

For Royal Mail Special Delivery Guaranteed and Royal Mail Tracked 24, customers can post orders up until Thursday 22 December 2016 for guaranteed Christmas delivery.

Royal Mail Special Delivery Saturday Guaranteed items must be in the Royal Mail system by Friday 23 December 2016 if orders are to arrive in time for Christmas Day.

Book your Christmas collections

Royal Mail are urging business customers to avoid a last minute rush by booking their Christmas collections in advance and accurately forecasting expected volumes. There’s very little point in having all your post bagged and ready to go just to find that your collection van is too full to accept all your parcels. Royal Mail know that it’s going to be busy but they only have so many vans so it’s hard to blame them if we can’t forecast how busy we ourselves will be, the difficulty is of course how to predict likely volumes.

In previous years we’ve seen much of the last minute Christmas rush pulled forward to Black Friday week (and it is now a week rather than a day). Sales have lagged in the run up to Black Friday, peaked for the week and then dropped to remain steady in the run up to the Christmas holiday, although there is still always a final flurry from those last minute shoppers.

If previous years are anything to go by this peak season will have some unexpected surprises along the way, shoppers are if anything unpredictable and never quite act exactly as they’re supposed to.

3 Responses

  1. I have to say that it amazes me how difficult Royal Mail make it to actually put small parcels in to the postal system. We use a Franking Machine, most of our items go via DPD, but some small parcels go 2nd class post for a great price of £2.57 – brilliant and being honest I cannot remember anything going missing. So as a service this is great.

    However, to get the parcels in to the system in the first place is hard work – the post office is always busy, a collection van collects from the 3 units/businesses next to me and the guy will not take my sack of parcels with him and yet often I bump in to the same driver at the post office when I go and he collects the bag I have just dropped off. How stupid is that !!!

    The business next door is happy for me to drop my sack off to get collected with their PPI stuff – they get a free collection as they do several sacks daily.

    They just don’t deserve the business.

  2. The answer is don’t use Royal Mail for parcels.

    Other carriers actually want the business, unlike Royal Mail / Porcel Farce, who don’t give a ****

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