07/05/2020
Royal Mail introduced fines for retailers on January 2nd 2020
Shipping is one of the most important elements of any eCommerce operation, and it is sensitive to all sorts of miscommunication and errors. Royal Mail, as a leading shipping and delivery option in the UK, is also quite prone to these errors. In recent years, they recorded some significant losses and caused their service quality to drop due to the miscommunication with the retailers, and the parcels that haven’t been organised properly. The key point is that it was something retailers were causing, while the Royal Mail was getting a bad reputation out of it. Now, they decided to put a stop to such behaviour!
Fines for retailers
All of the problems that persisted so far can be easily amended by paying more attention to packaging and following Royal Mail rules. Of course, many of the retailers tried to dodge those rules and they didn’t respect many of them, including package size and package weight.
As a result, Royal Mail decided to introduce fines for various breaches of the said rules. These fines range from 20 pens to 27.95 pounds, and include everything from wrong labelling, missing to collect the parcel and the storage expenses for uncollected items.
The ramifications of such an approach are various, and the most important ones include increased delivery costs, and the necessity to put the packing and shipping in order with most retailers operating in the UK.
It is expected that this new approach will force all of the involved to treat their parcels more carefully and to stick to the rules, or accept the increased costs which could render their businesses unprofitable, at least when it comes to the online outlets.
It affects the smaller retailers the most, as they are the ones that usually have trouble with packaging and labelling, as these companies are usually understaffed and more prone to being heavily affected even with smaller financial changes. Still, it is also expected that there will be more order in this sector thanks to these new fines and that the end result will be best seen through increased customer satisfaction which can only have positive impact on the overall situation ion eCommerce sector.