We’ve heard from an online seller who fell foul of Royal Mail levying charges for mistakes with their posting. At £25 per mistake the penalties were racking up and it appears misinformation was the culprit.
Having been hit with a couple of dozen surcharges in a month it turns out that for 8 years the seller has been doing things wrong. In fact it was only when Royal Mail visited that they got to the bottom of the matter and discovered what the problem was.
Using Royal Mail Max Sort, the seller had been told on multiple occasions by Royal Mail that a 1.5 kg minimum weight per country was in place. It turns out that it’s 1.5kg minimum weight per bag – each bag for each country for International Max Sort post needs to contain over 1.5kg of post.
Now they know the rules this isn’t a particular problem for the seller in question. It simply means that when sending large lightweight items his staff simply ensure that they mixed with smaller heavier items to bring each bag up to the minimum weight requirement. Previously just a few large light items may have gone into one sack but now they split them between multiple sacks distributed amongst the heavier parcels.
If you’re using Max Sort make sure that each bag weighs in at over 1.5kg to avoid any £25 fines as it appears that after 8 years of doing it wrong the fines have only recently started to be levied. They were always there, but for our seller there is a happy ending – Royal Mail agreed to refund all the fines as a courtesy gesture!
One Response
I fell foul of this a couple of years ago, but i received a phone call from Royal Mail the same day and i thought, (same as the seller above), as long as the total amount was over 1.5kg i was fine, but i was shown the error of my ways and they didn’t charge me the £25.00 fee, happy days and we now make sure we split the mail between sacks.
The only time i did get a £25.00 rework fee was when they made some changes to their labels for the Max Sort Service and we used an old one, again they phoned me the same day, but did charge me the fee.