Royal Mail Click & Drop has been down since this morning, leaving thousands of businesses unable to despatch their mail. Marketplace businesses are already seriously concerned about late shipments impacting their seller metrics due to their inability to ship on time.
At 9.22 this morning, Royal Mail said that they had identified an issue which is affecting page loading times and the speed of order imports for some of their customers. Engineers were working to correct the issue as quickly as possible.
At 13.27 the latest update was posted informing customers that Royal Mail teams are still working to fully resolve these issues. Unfortunately, Royal Mail deeply regret that they do not yet have a timescale to offer on a fix.
Currently then, you may be lucky and be able to get pages to load, or you may still be stuck trying. If you can divert some of the heavier goods via a courier it may be worthwhile doing so, but for lightweight items there really isn’t much of an alternative to Royal Mail. The other alternative is of course a trip to the Post Office and face the queues which may be longer than normal this afternoon.
Royal Mail will be posting updates on their website as they come in, but the chances are high that you’re not going to make today’s post.
We’ll be waiting to see if eBay or Amazon announce any leniency for sellers who have been unable to post sales from over the weekend.
At 17.14 Royal Mail said “While we are seeing the site return to normal service we are aware that some customers are still experience some issues. We are continuing to monitor the situation and will keep you updated as we know more.”
At 22.09 this evening Royal Mail posted an update saying that they are continuing to work with their partners to investigate the problems some customers encountered with Click & Drop today. They are treating this as their highest priority and ensuring all recommendations are implemented immediately to ensure the system performance is restored to the levels their customers expect.
Royal Mail statement
“Royal Mail is very sorry that an intermittent technical fault has been impacting a number of Click & Drop customers throughout the day. We apologise for any inconvenience caused to impacted customers, and we are working hard to restore normal service as quickly as possible.”
– A spokesperson for Royal Mail
29 Responses
Really pathetic of Royal Mail not to have a backup system in place, tried all day to generate labels but only the dispatch notes generated.
Nearly 200 orders have not shipped today. Cannot wait for the complaints…
Good Old Royal Snail at it again. The only service we use of theirs now (at our customers request ) is special delivery and that’s well overpriced.
This is not unusual, Meltdown Monday is a regular feature of Click & Drop.
I managed to ship but using my old ways with OBA, which you can sort of use with their emergency form.
Trouble is that there is no delivery confirmation at all, of course.
I was told that it wasn’t actually RM that created the problem, but one of their partners who made a change.
I don’t really see it myself but as with so many things, never have all your eggs in one basket and try to have a backup plan.
Luckily I managed to find some old 1st class PPI labels and will have to work on my backup as they didn’t print when they should have.
Ahhhh the fun.
@ Darren, “meltdown Monday” thats a good name for it.
Yes this has happened to us EVERY Monday since we started using Click and Drop last November. The system slows up as the day goes on until we are waiting up to 10 mins for 1 label to become “printable”. We were told we could no longer use the old RM system so when Click and Drop doesn’t work we have no back up other than Hermes – but Hermes isn’t always suitable for our packets / locations.
Today 25th June has been far the worse day since we started using Click and Drop. We were able to get 1 label printed today since 10am this morning. I only hope that ebay will protect us from the late delivery defects we will no doubt accumulate. I have tried to minimise the problem by trying to put as many packets as possible through Hermes but with their earlier collection it was not logistically possible to get everything through.
Not happy with RM. This has been going on for months but today has been by far the worst “meltdown Monday”.
@ alan funny how royalmail are in meltdown
yet ebay are beyond reproach , its ebay users at fault
We managed to slowly gt 1 label at a time but only got about a 3rd of our shipments done and labelled. Then we could not print a manifest for the driver.
Our issue is when we shipped 32 items as large letter at an average weight of 132 grams but we had 73 more sate here at lower weights we will now be charged at 250 gram average on all those items as we could not get all sorted and therefore lower the average below the 100 gram. We had to work through the orders as oldest first to save negatives and late delivery issues.
Cannot believe that in 4 years on DMO it totally failed four times yet in just 5 weeks of Click and drop it has already failed 3 times.
So much for faster better all singing all dancing.
All rubbish more like.
What a mess, this where the RM need to have backups in place before paying out dividends to shareholders.
We have a feeling that some of the labels were getting mixed up, my despatch manager guy came to me at the end of the day saying he had a bad feeling about the labels he did manage to get out of C&D.
Well that was fun….
Managed to get 120+ orders out and manifested using 3 computers and 9 different browsers.
Took me all day rather than an hour.
I was also able to drop the mail sacks into the back of the local delivery office to catch the last lorry at 7.30pm and had a well deserved pint after.
As a small business this was frustrating and with plans to expand my business to 2-4x what we are currently doing I would have been tearing my hair out, if I had any….
I have been using C&D for a year now, overall I have had very few problems, lets hope that RM learn from this.
We managed to get quarter of what we needed to yesterday (25th), only to get stuck in a traffic jam after an accident that closed the road, arrived half an hour after the sorting office was shut, but luckily managed to get them to take them of me!
I read somewhere it was a Microsoft issue, I bet that means it was a Windows Update that started automatically ( it happens all the time on servers!).
I must have missed it, I printed out all labels at 11.15pm and all were sent out.