Interparcel

silentkiller

My company has used Interparcel for about a year now with no problems... Until I tried to send a parcel via Collect+ to Ireland. They wanted us to pay £18+vat for this service. I went onto Collect+ site where they offered the exact same service for £4.89+vat!!

I called both companies to seek clarification on this - Collect said that they don't know why they charge so much since they offer them a substantial discount on everything. Interparcel say they receive no discount.

Anyway I decided not to use them for Collect+ items any more. This morning I was asked by the sales team to do a quote for a shipment of 5 boxes to Italy and the results were astounding when I compared them to another comparison site:

Both services are identical
For a Parcelforce service IP want £171, for Parcel2go it is £142.50.


Granted for some of the services they are cheaper! But it's proven to me to actually look around as opposed to assuming it is cheaper for everything!

visidigi

The courier companies don't want these companies undercutting them all the time - if you look over the past 6-10 months the prices have been steadily rising for the resellers such as interparcel and Parcel2go - they're slowly losing the price benefit they once had - they have caused all sorts of problems to the courier companies themselves - with people buying UPS through interparcel for example, for some reason the buyer seems to think they can deal direct with UPS once they've paid the lower fee to interparcel, the customer can ONLY speak to Interparcel - the likes of UPS, DHL and FedEx have got very fed up with this of late...

I wouldn't personally use parcelforce outside of the UK, they usually subcontract it out to another provider...

silentkiller

visidigi wrote: »

The courier companies don't want these companies undercutting them all the time - if you look over the past 6-10 months the prices have been steadily rising for the resellers such as interparcel and Parcel2go - they're slowly losing the price benefit they once had - they have caused all sorts of problems to the courier companies themselves - with people buying UPS through interparcel for example, for some reason the buyer seems to think they can deal direct with UPS once they've paid the lower fee to interparcel, the customer can ONLY speak to Interparcel - the likes of UPS, DHL and FedEx have got very fed up with this of late...

I wouldn't personally use parcelforce outside of the UK, they usually subcontract it out to another provider...

No I don't think we normally use parcel force but in this case it was the cheapest for the customer. (They decided they wanted to pay for their own courier in the end anyway)

I think the idea of comparison companies are good but I can see how it gets frustrating when people buy online and expect to be able to speak directly to the company. But then thats one thing I would prefer - to speak directly to the company.

I think shopping around for a bit longer is necessary for international shipping, but I just wanted people to realise that just because it says they are the cheapest comparison site, they are not. I was fooled into this because I was too lazy to look around.