In September, Royal Mail advised a change to their service terms and conditions update requiring those using Royal Mail 24 or Royal Mail 48 to provide an accurate weight and pre-advice for each item.
Having listened to customer feedback and to give you more time to meet this requirement, Royal Mail have now extended the timescale to the 28th of March 2022. Good news for many retailers – Q4 is hardly the time to be messing around and requiring new processes to be introduced.
“Customers posting via Royal Mail 24 and Royal Mail 48 will be required to provide an accurate weight and pre-advice for each item, unless they are using Royal Mail’s Basic Barcode solution or are a flat rate customer.
(A flat rate is a standard charge calculated by Royal Mail based on your posting profile for each Royal Mail 24 and Royal Mail 48 item where such standard charge applies for a fixed period of time.)”
– Royal Mail
Products requiring accurate weight and pre-advice
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|---|---|
| CRL | Royal Mail 24/48 Daily Rate |
| PK3 | Royal Mail 24 (SORT8) (LL/P) Daily Rate |
| PK4 | Royal Mail 48 (SORT8) (LL/P) Daily Rate |
| RM1 | Royal Mail 24 (LL) Daily Rate |
| RM2 | Royal Mail 24 (P) Daily Rate |
| RM3 | Royal Mail 48 (LL) Daily Rate |
| RM4 | Royal Mail 48 (P) Daily Rate |
Charges for incorrect Average Daily Weight Postings
From the 1st of October 2021, Royal Mail will be updating charges for instances where the incorrect Average Weight is declared on Royal Mail 24 or Royal Mail 48 Average Daily Weight Large Letters and Parcels products. These will cover the costs incurred when the average weight of your posting is mis-declared on your posting documentation and information contained within the barcodes compared to what is actually presented to Royal Mail.
Details of these charges can be found on the Royal Mail Group Surcharges page .
9 Responses
Probably a bit silly question, but here we do a lot of 100 grams or less so we always put average weight a lot more than they physically are. Am sure this practice should be okay? Its impractical to weigh countless packages that are all going to be sub 100 grams and vary by just 5 to 10 grams. Though knowing Royal Mail I am probably doing it wrong when the change is implemented….
Shame they no longer have dedicated managers, the account management team don’t always seem to know answers to questions or clarifying things.
If they want to force LARGE posters to weight each item and enter exact weight – it will kill them – too much time consuming.
Yes I was wondering this as we have mostly sub 100 grams, we put more weight than they physically are. Its bad enough with the customs entry now for airmail, though this will be more time consuming than that.
I was thinking of contacting account managed team (dedicated ones no longer it seems, they seemed to know more anyhow), but perhaps a waste of time. As long as they are not over 100grams the price band is the same, so it does seem crazy if we have to weigh every single package?!
Royal Mail…. this is starting to become very tedious, has anyone looked at the dedicated page for surcharges on the Royal Mail website? its a mile long! I guess over the past year or two they have had a group of consultants help them implement the surcharges to boost profits, I know several big users of Royal Mail have either stopped using them or started to cut down volume and move to another supplier. Its simply not possible to weigh every single item to an exacting weight when dispatching 100’s or 1000’s of parcels a day, for example the same items can vary between batches so even if the weights were saved on file they could easily be wrong, one of the points of being a business customer was flexibility but even speding £100k’s per year makes no differance, sometimes things do go wrong in the daily life of a ecommerce seller, sometimes not everything gets collected and shipped on the same day, printers fail, drivers don’t show up, bad weather… this list is endless you can not try and surcharge us for everything!
I have always thought highly of Royal Mail but this continual nickel and diming is getting to the point where we just tell them to forget it and we will move more over to over carriers (we have already moved 20% away from them over last 6 months).
If people are/were abusing the Royal Mail system most of these have surely been rooted out with random checks and the barcode system, to continually keep antagonising your biggest customers will eventually come back and bite you!
I spoke to RM last week about this because like others I always add a little extra weight just to be sure all my parcels are always below the 1 kg so I assumed it would not matter too much
But I was told you will be fined if the amount in weight on the manifest differs from the actual weight above or below it did not matter, they said it has always been a exact weight service
They then went onto say that the only way to be safe is weight every single parcel its black or white no more grey I am afraid:(
@Rob
Royal Mail to fine customers if the over declare weight. Just about says it all really.
I really feel for those who have to use their services- we left years ago and use couriers but I understand all sellers can’t do that.
Would not be a shock if RM are being Restructured and trimmed up for a buy out or takeover
I think its just so nuts. Much more time now weighing packages that are well within 100gram weight limit. I did confirm today with Royal Mail account manager and this is the case, though he did not mention fines.
This is all to do with Royal Mail new Packet sorting machines. These machine measure, weigh and sort the parcels. Believe me, if your out, you will know about it, so all those saying, we will just put 99g even when the package is 50g, don’t, you will appear on a nasty report emailed to you. My friends business were trialled, in 1 day they got a page and a half of PDF sent to them detailing every item that was wrong and would incur a charge.
You see things like:
You declared 66g, We found 51g and you get penalised.
You declared 24mm , We found 26mm, enjoy the £3 extra charge.