RM 'Click and Drop' vs PO 'Drop and Go' (vs stamps)

[mr_il]

Hi everyone!

I am representing a small family business. We sell items online and use Royal Mail to dispatch the items. On most days we ship 10-20 orders, and 95% of them are in standard letter-sized envelopes with a mixture of 1st and 2nd class domestic, as well as international standard letters. At the moment our dispatch workflow involves sticking stamps on the envelopes, preparing bulk certificate of posting, and queuing in the nearby Post Office branch. Postage cost is acceptable, but queuing is very time consuming, as we have a busy branch.

I was looking for an alternative way to deal with dispatches that is going to be more efficient, and it seems there are two options: Royal Mail Click and Drop, and Post Office Drop and Go. Neither of them seems perfect, but I wanted to ask the forum a couple of questions about each to help to make a decision on which one to pick (or stay with stamps!).

RM Click and Drop seems to be able to do everything, and is also cheaper than the stamps, but there seems to be a requirement to sort all mail into separate sacks by product type. In practice this means I would need to prepare 3 sacks daily with only 3-5 envelopes rattling in each, and it seems to be a lot of hassle, not to mention waste of paper for relatively small shipping volume. Further, it seems that our Post Office branch requires all Click and Drop customers to queue alongside with everyone else. So a couple of questions:
1) Anecdotally the sorting isn't a requirement, all mail could go into a single sack (https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Busines ... ue#M166362) -- is it really so?
2) Do Post Office have to offer a fast-track drop service for Click and Drop customers?

Now regarding PO Drop and Go, it seems to be much newer service. It is also not cheaper, but looks like a lot quicker with a promise of fast-track drops in the branches. The question is, does this service really work and was anyone able to save time with it?

Appreciate any help!

[Ganand]

We are a small online business doing 10 to 20 parcels a day, large letter to medium parcel size.

We have a click and drop account and we find it very good.

We have our click & drop account linked to our sales software. We use eBay, Amazon and WooCommerce on our own website.

Sales automatically get fed into our click & drop account, we then 'tick' all (say) large letters, apply postage.

This applies postage to all the large letters in one fell swoop. We repeat for small parcels and med parcels.

Then we pay for everything in one go and our labels all go to one .pdf, which we print with a 6" x 4" thermal label printer.

All addresses etc are all there ready, we only have about 1 in 50 where an error in the postcode means we have to edit.

When we are all packed and labelled anything that can go in a postbox does, and small parcels etc are taken to our main branch. Yes we queue but as they are labelled and paid for, and we don't bother with proof of posting we more or less abandon them on the counter. Job done.

Also great are the new QR barcodes, these are scanned at the delivery address as proof of delivery. This has been brought in to cut down on fraud.

Worked great for us last week. What looked like a serial fraudster ordered £30 worth, hadn't signed for it so thought he'd wait a week or so and claim no delivery. The QR code (via RM track & trace) showed it was delivered to his house (in the middle of nowhere, no neighbours) next day.

We googled his address and pointed all this out and he came back with a sheepish "I'll check my cctv", that was the last we heard.