Online retailers will wake up this morning to discover problems with Royal Mail OBA (Online Business Account). This will prove a bit of a bind for those who rely on the accounts to purchase postage and Royal Mail asked customers to hold off on manifesting as this was the part that didn’t work. Royal Mail provided an alternative link for producing their standard paperwork to enable them to carry on shipping until the OBA glitch was resolved shortly after 11am.
Royal Mail’s Click & Drop team appeared to be squarely dodging responsibility for this one and making certain everyone knows that it’s not their fault. The language of their status update is very clear on this – not “We” as in the entire Royal Mail team have a problem, very much that the “Royal Mail OBA Department” have a problem. One might almost read into this that the Click & Drop team have had their own own share of glitches and they’re refusing to take the blame this time around.
Royal Mail Comment
“Customers using Click & Drop have been able to access all services as normal including creating labels and applying postage. However the Online Business Account (OBA) outage meant that Click & Drop customers were unable to access their online paperwork via OBA. We acted swiftly on a workaround for customers by providing them with a new link to standard paperwork so that they could process their orders as normal. This meant customers could continue to access all elements of the Click & Drop service all morning. Their Online Business Account services were restored at 11.15am.”
– Royal Mail
Royal Mail Click & Drop Status Announcement
12th March, 07:33am
“Investigating – Royal Mail’s Online Business Account is currently having technical issues.
We have been contacted by Royal Mail OBA Department and they have asked that customers refrain from manifesting until further notice.
We will provide updates throughout the day. We Apologies for any inconvenience caused by this.”
– Royal Mail
12th March 09:38am
Identified – Our engineers have identified the cause of the issue and are currently working on a fix. We aim to resume normal service as quickly as possible. We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused.
– Royal Mail
12 March 11:14am
Resolved – We are pleased to announce the issue affecting manifesting has now been resolved, and all systems are now operational. Thank you for your patience, and please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
– Royal Mail
16 Responses
Since Christmas I have found using the Click & Drop portal to be quite slow. Late last year they did do some work to improve the speed and it worked really well.
It does not matter who’s fault it is, people do not blame a department they blame the company, Royal Mail.
no track or trace or tracking updates either
my hermes becomes more attractive by the day
reliability and cost
We are pleased to announce that the issues affecting Royal Mail’s Online Business account system have now been resolved. You can now manifest your orders again as usual.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
BE quick and manifest they will probably be bust in half and hour again
Royal Mail : The Best
Why the Royal Mail bashing? This was yesterday (12th) but is being reported on your latest news email today (13th) making it look like the issue is still active
I use Hermes and could not produce any labels through Hermes for a chunk of yesterday morning but cant see this reported anywhere on Tamebay?
At least i could still despatch order and produce labels via Royal Mail, i just couldn’t manifest which is done late in the afternoon anyway and the issue was fixed
Your headline is very misleading, we could still process orders, create labels etc through Click & Drop, we just could not manifest, and to be honest as this is generally done later in the day, i would not have noticed there was an issue