Royal Mail has launched a new International Tracked service that enables account customers as well as consumers to send heavier and larger items abroad. With International Tracked & Signed Heavier, Royal Mail is providing an equivalent export option for all items handled in the UK.
Royal Mail account customers can now send parcels of up to 30kg in weight and non-account holders, including consumers, can send up to 20kg in weight. All customers can now send larger parcels up to the dimensions of 61cm x 46cm x 46cm.
International Tracked & Signed Heavier enables Brits to send larger and heavier parcels to family and friends abroad. Popular items to send include care packages, a selection of books and larger items of clothing such as coats. This is particularly helpful for parents with children living or studying abroad.
Royal Mail also offers IOSS to support easy shipments to the EU and delivery with duties paid to eight destinations to make the process quicker and easier for recipients.
This new International Tracked & Signed Heavier service is available to most destinations around the world including popular destinations such as USA, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Japan and Ireland. Prior to this, customers could only send up to 2kg worldwide, up to 5kg to selected destinations and up to a maximum of 90cm for all three dimensions combined.
Once onboarded, Royal Mail account customers can purchase the new International Tracked service through their Royal Mail approved shipping solution. Non-account holders and consumers can access the heavier and larger capability through Royal Mail’s Click and Drop. Parcels can then be collected from them through Royal Mail’s convenient Parcel Collect service, or dropped off at Parcel Postboxes and Post Office branches.
The interesting thing here is the word “onboarded”…. this suggests that the service won’t magically appear on your account – you may need to speak to your account manager to access International Tracked & Signed Heavier.
This fits with Royal Mail’s stated intention to become a parcels service that also delivers letters, and brings a more Parcelforce type service into the Royal Mail standard offering.
After the challenges of the last few years, many businesses and marketplace sellers are looking for ways to open up new markets and new opportunities for growth. Expanding our products so that all of our customers can send heavier and larger items through the Royal Mail International services they already use and trust is a great way of enabling just that. Our shipping solutions make it really easy to use these services and are just one of the ways we are changing to help our customers to grow.
– Nick Landon, Chief Commercial Officer at Royal Mail
2 Responses
It makes you wonder just what future Parcelforce has…
With Royal Mail increasingly improving their parcel offerings, Parcelforce seems pretty pointless now.
Maybe RMG are looking at offloading it, or will fully integrate them into the Royal Mail network, before dropping the brand.
The point of Parcelforce is still doing the things Royal Mail doesn’t want to.
I believe they are going to be sharing some resources in future, but as it stands, Parcelforce is a proper parcel courier, that will take large items, multi-parcel consignments, and is comparable to the likes of DPD or Fedex. Royal Mail are good for small-medium single parcel consignments, so more comparable to the likes of Evri.