Royal Mail have confirmed that DMO (Despatch Manager Online) is to be retired in 2018 with the replacement service being dubbed Click & Drop. When we broke the news yesterday about DMO’s retirement, we promised we’d take a look at Click & Drop and get you the inside details you need to know.
You don’t need to make any changes before Christmas!
Good news, you need do nothing this side of Christmas (unless you want to). We know you’re run off your feet processing orders and so do Royal Mail. Whilst they’re starting to raise awareness of Click & Drop the last thing they want you to do is to have to change how you work in the busiest quarter of the year.
Why are Royal Mail retiring DMO?
Royal Mail are looking to new technology which is simpler, more modern and crucially compliant with modern Internet browsers. At the same time they are introducing a ton more features to make life easier for the hard working online retailer.
Click & Drop sees a ton of new features such as the ability to import orders from many marketplaces and website platforms – already supported are Amazon, eBay, Big Commerce, Magento, Shopify & Not On The High Street with more such as Etsy coming soon. Plus Click & Drop will also mark items as despatched and upload tracking numbers.
There are tools to make your life easier so if for example you have a best selling product which always ships in the same size box, is always the same weight and you always ship via the same Royal Mail service then you can save a rule to pre-populate these options every time you sell one.
There are some nice touches such as the ability to feature your brand name in Royal Mail email and SMS tracking notifications to your customers. This is available to all Click & Drop users not matter small your business is giving you another way to reinforce your brand with your customers.
Royal Mail Click & Drop features
The three types of DMO user and how Royal Mail Click & Drop applies to you
Pay as you go customers
If you’re been accustomed to paying for your postage through Online Postage (OLP) or in the past used SmartStamp then you can use Click & Drop in pretty much the same way, but with a ton more features. You can still choose to pay with credit card or PayPal.
Account Customers
If you’re a Royal Mail Online Business Account (OBA) user then again you can simply switch to using Click & Drop. You’ll simply enter your OBA account number and posting location when you sign up to the new service.
API Customers
If you have an API integration with Royal Mail DMO, either through your own software or through a third party multichannel management program then you need to make no changes for the foreseeable future. Royal Mail are aiming to migrate all API customers in the summer of 2018 and hope to do this in a seamless manner with absolute minimal input needed from their users.
14 Responses
I won’t be sad to see the back of DMO – why the Royal Mail have been forcing customers to run outdated, unsecure, buggy Java addons in browsers that are actively turning away from, and even allowing them to run on newer versions, has confused and annoyed me for a very long time.
However, if we start having to start entering box sizes and weights for each order we will not be happy. From a brief initial look at the documentation it appears labels aren’t automatically sent to a printer either.
Had a look at Click & Drop today & its very confusing & not an easy system to use, all the weights, sizing & service required have to be entered even though the info is imported
Not had a proper look at it but looking at the write up it looked interesting that you can upload from Ebay, Amazon, and for us Wooocmmerce. The part I don’t understand and no details are in the write up above is what happens to Account customers who use DMO on account as in post now pay in a month/3 weeks later as it only mentions OBA which is quite simply putting a label on a parcel and working out the average weight. Unless the above has been explained incorrectly so a bit confused.
Hi Toby. We’ve been using C+D for a couple of years now and it’s brilliant. Like all new systems, it took some getting used to at first but within a couple of weeks, we were wishing we’d had it forever.
I wouldn’t hesitate to move to it if you’re using DMO, you’ll have to anyway and you won’t regret it.
We do not have standard size packages or customers buy multiple items of a different size and weight. If I have to enter weights and package size for every item it will be a nightmare. I can see it being great for RM as there would be no average weight so they will have full prices for every item
@ Claire it’s very easy to cancel an un-manifested label in C + D, you just select the item and choose reset. Never done it through a 3rd party right enough.
@ Philip Green. C + D does average weight across the applicable services. You can import product weights dimensions etc via csv ( never done it so don’t know the ins and outs ) and you can also set it to remember product details far as I know.
All in all I reckon it’s a pretty good system quite intuitive.
The one thing I did suggest to them is combining separate orders with same address coming from the eBay feed which would save a bit of pissing about deleting orders.
Oh and a degree of auto formatting for the special ones who don’t know what a capital letter or a space is… at least they know their address ( or name ) right enough which is better than some ha !
I will try and answer some of the questions…
@OlPeculier & Toby
You can select and assign postage in bulk, click on all the parcels that are the same size and apply postage to them all, we mostly use 500g as an average weight but you can put them all at 1500g, you pay the same.
We mostly use CRL48 which does need to assign parcel size, Medium Parcel goes the same as a Small Parcel. With BPL you have to assign the size of parcel from the two sizes, but you can bulk add as many as you want.
@ Tony Shore – What Scott said
You are allocated an OBA account that Click & Drop connects to and compiles the Sales Order for each day / manifest. We log into OBA each day and print a Sales Order off for our records.
@Claire
Before you manifest you can select the label or group of labels and re assign the postage or simply reset them to no postage.
@Philip Green – See the response to @OlPeculier & Toby above
It depends on what tariff you are on but I do not think it would be a problem for you.
We have been using it for 6 months now and if you have any questions please ask.
I’m an OBA user but I signed up for Click & Drop a few weeks ago. I decided to keep it separate from my OBA for the time being as I like the idea of just being to do a one-off and stick it in the post box without generating paperwork and having to take it to the PO.
The PAYG software is just awful. You have to put the customer’s name onto two lines, first and last name. Why? The address formatting is the same, everything on different lines so you can’t just copy the whole address and paste it. Creating an order is counter-intuitive too, everything is just so clunky.
I even bought a 2nd hand Zebra thermal printer to do the labels, there doesn’t even seem to be a facility to generate the labels in landscape format.
But the absolute worst thing is that everything is done in a pop-up window on your browser and if you click anywhere outside this pop-up, the pop-up just disappears and you lose all the information you’ve input and have to start again.