I have been sent a list of the new Post Office price changes..... Outrageous....

soolin

I remember when these changes were first announced the popular press took exception because someone worked out that sending a child's thick birthday card with a large badge on the front would have to go as a parcel as the badge bit would exceed the 2.5cms depth rule.

Soo

barbie_babe

i think people who cant get out or have children and dont like to take them shopping will pay 2.50 postage.

r.mac_2

for what it is is worth - Postage costs on any online order I make is often what helps make my decision. As rates go up, I will shop less and less online. The service I recieve from RM, both as a sender and recipient of mail, is appalling. I'll choose to vote with my feet (and get out there to buy instead). What a shame for internet sellers (which includes me on an irregular basis).

blue_monkey_2

I have to agree. I always check the postage price being a seller myself and I will not pay loads of money for postage. I do have children but I will probably choose to shop elsewhere in other sales where the postage is cheaper - or even free. Let's take for example a pair of kiddies jeans being sold on eBay - postage now would be £1.00 or so, that would have to go up to min £2.50 plus the price of the jeans. Boots do them for £3, as do Asda, I know where I shall be shopping if the prices do go up. I see it from both sides. There is not much that will get away with the cheaper postage rates and they have made sure of this really. I feel sorry for the Post Office workers though, are they going to have to measure every package becau se it cannot be bigger than A4 size either and the leaflet I have says that A3 can only be sent through contract posting. Bizarre. Still, having posted on a different board and had a different veiwpoint put to me from someone else - greed with get the post office nowhere and someone else will do their sums and come up with a better service for less money - let's face it the market is there to be taken!!

In regard to the prices going up and also down, it is deceptive what the leaflet and website tell you, it says that 750g is now 271 and has a drop of 24%, however it does not tell you that the postage service that now for 150g - 46p, 200g - 64p, 250g - 79p, 300g - 94p, 350g - 107p, etc.. now goes up to £2.06 if it is thicker than 2.5cm so a rise from 46p to £206 is a 450% rise!! They do not make that too obvious do they! I fact they tell you that the price of this service has dropped by 24%. Let's face it, if we popped down to tesco and they put their Hovis bread up to £3.60 there would be uproar from everyone and no one would say it was fair because the price of eggs had dropped by 10p and this evened it out! Food for thought (pardon the pun). x

soolin

I worry about my little post office as well as the queues are horrendous sometimes. I sell loads of different things, so I would never have a standard package, I could end up with 20 packets of all differing sizes and have to have each one checked for dimension as well as weight. At least half her queue is ebay, and we all sell all manner of things, one person struggles in with a porters trolley like thing of boxes every day or two all different shapes and sizes.

I caused chaos once selling an very long, thin item, we had everyone measuring it, checking overall dimensions as it ended up exceeding the special delivery dimension limit. That was bad enough, my poor post lady..

Also, another thing the popular press picked up on was ebay buyers may end up with more damaged goods. For instance, selling china or fragile electrical equipment at the moment can be packed as big as you want as it is the weight that matters, so the last china I sent was wrapped in swathes of bubble wrap which ended up making a large but very light parcel. Might sellers be tempted in future to wrap less well to try and get down a size for dimension purposes?

Oh well, we will just have to worry about it next year when it happens.

Soo

smashed

On the bright side... the queues at the post office wont be so bad in future

To me it looks like RM trying to take a bigger slice of the Ebay pie. Im sure that they must get a lot of income through that.

soolin

smashed wrote:

On the bright side... the queues at the post office wont be so bad in future

To me it looks like RM trying to take a bigger slice of the Ebay pie. Im sure that they must get a lot of income through that.

My little post office says the only reason they weren't closed in the latest local closures was because they had a lot of ebay business. Ebayers are very profitable, we use high cost services, lots of extras like signed for and recorded, we send items in bulk and we know what we are doing (usually) so are relatively quick to deal with.

What the sub post offices don't want are the people who send one parcel a year, don't wrap it properly, don't know what they want to do with it, or how to send it then tell the staff that in the good old days they could have sent the same package for 3/6d and got it there by tea time.

They also don't want people drawing out pensions as that is no benefit to them either.

I even got a bottle of wine as a gift from my post office at Christmas for being such a good customer.

Soo

apprentice_tycoon

I agree with everything Soo says about ebayers being welcome at the small PO's, we keep the place ticking over.

I have just come back from my PO, I asked about how they would be handling the parcels from next year with regard to the sizes and depths of package etc. The manager knew nothing about it, only what has been in the news generally, she hadn't seen the piece that was linked to in the OP or anything. We know more about it than the staff....I couldn't believe it

Spinner

I wouldn't stress over it - it will hit most people, so the chances are that buyers will sooner or later stop grumbling about the higher charges and just accept that it's not the seller's fault, it's affecting all similar sellers, and they won't be able to find a much better deal elsewhere. At least, my £0.02... :rolleyes:

Alleycat

Spinner wrote:

I wouldn't stress over it - it will hit most people, so the chances are that buyers will sooner or later stop grumbling about the higher charges and just accept that it's not the seller's fault, it's affecting all similar sellers, and they won't be able to find a much better deal elsewhere.

Fair enough, but will many small sellers/WAHM's still be in business? The larger sellers will probably have a bit of a buffer to cope with reduced sales, but not the little fish.

I feel very sorry for those of you whose livelihood is through selling on Ebay or your own internet/mail order businesses.