Great Tips to Cut Postage Costs Hunt

izzitme

ayla261 wrote:

Royal Mail provides a service and refuses to allow competitiors to develop on a large scale meaning customers have no choice of how they send items,

Since January 2006 competitors have been able to offer a similar service, but they do not have the infrastructure to do so. Also they are not prepared to offer a same price service for mail from one street to the next or from Land's End to John O' Groats. The charge for local post helps subsidise the cost of the long distance service.

The new system now more realistically covers the actual cost of handling parcels & larger envelopes etc.
The final straw was a few months ago when a business sent out a large quantity of helium balloons in boxes. Royal Mail were only able to charge by weight for this mailing, but they had to hire a number of articulated lorries & trailers, at vast expense, to distribute & deliver the items.

ayla261

izzitme wrote:

The final straw was a few months ago when a business sent out a large quantity of helium balloons in boxes. Royal Mail were only able to charge by weight for this mailing, but they had to hire a number of articulated lorries & trailers, at vast expense, to distribute & deliver the items.

sorry but :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

izzitme

Feel free to use your local branch of Mailboxes Etc. They work in conjunction with FEDEX (I think, but it may be another "express" courier) to provide a delivery service starting from around £15 ?

Or stick with Royal Mail who may not be 100% reliable but are amongst the lowest cost mail provider in Europe & possibly the world.

ayla261

thanks will check those out, i'm now considering prepaying for courier services as it may work out cheaper to post thru them. I know theres a company local to us that is offering a great rate but you have to pay for something like 250/500 deliveries upfront

pinkfluffybabe

student100 wrote:

fact is, for the past however-many-years you've been costing Royal Mail money. Whatever you have been posting has cost them much more than 70p to send. Now they are redressing the balance and charging a fair amount.

This would be more reasonable was it not for the amount of mail that goes missing and the generally shoddy service that many people receive from Royal Mail. There are several threads on here from people who have had recurrent problems with their mail delivery. Its all very well being cheap, but when you can't send a birthday card through the post without it going missing, or having anything inside it stolen, they have a cheek to charge through the nose for their services.

happybop

Hi,

I discovered on the royalmail.com website that you can buy postage online and pay for it using a credit card.

I had a large letter to send and only had first class stamps in the house. Normally I would bung two on so that I wouldn't have to go to the post office (as postbox is only at the top of the road). But instead I purchased postage for 44p and printed out the address with the postage.

The postage has to be for a specific addresse and used within a couple of days of purchase. I think it is a great service and but I haven't seen it advertised. Could cut down on some of those long queues at the Post Office.

So their ideas aren't all bad!

Happybop

mcdonag

My way of cutting postage costs is to buy stamps at auctions.

Not very people know this but you can used old stamps as long as they are decimal.

I can buy decimal stamps at way below face value and use them on my mail.

PeteW

My tip would be to join GapBuster and do Mystery Shopping for your local Post Office, I normally do this to co-incide with an ebay cheap listing day, and get all my postage refunded (up to about £10)

ayla261

PeteW wrote:

My tip would be to join GapBuster

when clicked this link takes me to ap age asking for language selection then takes me to a sign in page, no details of how to join

student100

happybop wrote:

I discovered on the royalmail.com website that you can buy postage online and pay for it using a credit card.

Yes I spotted this the other day but haven't tried it yet.

Direct link: https://www.royalmail.com/onlinepostage