Royal Mail Online Postage

...buy postage online from the Royal Mail website at http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm - so, being an adventurous soul, and having quite a lot of Christmas cards to send to various places around the world I thought I would give it a go. I hoped it would save me from a trip to the Post Office and the inevitable queue so I set off to the website to investigate.

You will find the handy little logo, like the one in the illustration, a fair ...
...easy answer was 'no you can't' and it shouldn't have taken a week to say that in my view.

Overall I would say a good start for Royal Mail but they do need to work on that interface before I will be more than an occasional user!  ... more

You may well have seen or heard the publicity? Yes - you can now buy postage online from the Royal Mail website at http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm - so, being an adventurous soul, and having quite a lot of Christmas cards to send to various places around the world I thought I would give it a go. I hoped it would save me from a trip to the Post Office and the inevitable queue so I set off to the website to investigate.

You will find the handy little logo, like the one in the illustration, a fair way down the page. Click on it if you want to 'find out more'. - OK so I did that, and did it tell me the more I wanted to know? No it didn't. I wanted to know how to use the site and what it could do and frankly it didn't give that information all together in an easily accessible form so, for you lucky people out there, I will try to give you a basic outline!

In short what you can do is calculate the postage for your item, enter the address you are sending it to, create a mailing label complete with postage logo, open an account (or just pay outright for the individual item) and then print the label. All in all quite simple really, but in practice I found it was rather more complicated than I would have liked.

What it DOES do
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1. You can buy stamps for your letters online at the cost price - in other words, unlike using a franking machine, you don't pay a premium to use the service you just pay the actual cost of the postage. - excellent
2. It lets you print out a label to put on your envelope (or to print on to your actual envelope) and don't worry if you make a mistake it will let you reprint it if you want - excellent
3. It allows you a couple of days to post it - so if you buy the postage today you have to post it by tomorrow night for it to be valid. - good feature
4. It lets you set up an account, online, that you can go back to and use as and when you want. - good feature
5. You only need to enter the weight of your package and where it is going to and it calculates the correct postage rate for you! - great

What it DOESN'T do
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This is the frustrating part, for me at least, as I found myself getting rather more bogged down in what it doesn't do. I found it very tedious and overly complex to use but suspect this was mainly beacuse they have to have some kind of security features built in there - even so there is much they could do to make it more user friendly.

1. It is only available for a limited range of services - for example I wanted to send some of my cards 'surface mail' overseas and you can't buy postage on line for that - you have to use Airmail if you are buying online! You can't buy Second Class postage either only First Class. - disappointing

2. It won't just print the postage label, you have to enter the address you are sending it to and then print a whole label. I can understand that this could be because of security however if, like me, you have whole load of cards to send all weighing exactly the same and all going to the same country to have to go back to square one for each label is very frustrating (and very time consuming!) Plus if you have all your addresses in a database it would be so helpful if you could just import that and then 'merge' the labels instead of having to type them all out! - needs improvement

3. It prints the labels in 'ones' - it just seems so silly to me, surely I should be able to input all the details and then print a sheet of four labels at once rather than four separate sheets each with a single label on it! They give you the choice of printing on to your envelope, or A4, A5 and A6 but I never did find a way of printing four different labels on to the sheet of A4 - it may be that the feature is hidden away in there somewhere but, if it is, I never managed to find it! - needs improvement

Conclusion
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Did I manage to get my cards posted - yes I did. However if I am honest it would probably have been quicker to go to the Post Iffice and queue for stamps. Entering all the names and addresses was very tedious plus it was frustrating to have to keep going back to the beginning of the process for each one. I didn't have specialised labels so I ended up printing the labels on plain paper and then sticking them to the envelopes! One time when I went to the site it had a technical problem and wasn't working at all and another time it let me get right through to almost the end and had a fault which was even more annoying! I know it is new, however there do still seem to be quite a number of problems which I think should have been ironed out earlier.

Would I use it again? Probably - but only for odd items and not for batches I wanted to post. I did use it to mail a calendar I had sold on eBay to the USA and it meant I could despatch it the same day it sold. This resulted in one very happy American who was so impressed to receive her goods 'from England within four days'. I would certaily use it for things like that again.

I really did want to give the Post Office some feedback on their site because I do think it is a good start at embracing technology but it needs more work to make it user friendly. Well that is what I wanted to do - but having asked the question about whether I could use it for 'Surface Mail' it took them over a week to reply! What kind of customer service is that? Admittedly they sent me an email the same day to say they had got the question, plus another one saying the same three days later - but the question wasn't exactly 'rocket science' - the easy answer was 'no you can't' and it shouldn't have taken a week to say that in my view.

Overall I would say a good start for Royal Mail but they do need to work on that interface before I will be more than an occasional user! 

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