Hi, Totally agree scandle in the making, and someone needs to dig deeper into this practice. Every now and again i get these surcharges, and have to spend 30mins or so pulling together evidence and challeneging them. Thus far all been over turn and rightly so. Most silliest one was like yours was a 15/10gm item in a DL envelope and they had the cheek to say it was a PARCEL! size.
I did have my letters checked once. They all went through the template my end and got a call saying 4 were oversize! Went to depot show it goes through my template then came the excuses that it needs to be a template like theres! and then that it should go through freely without a pull at the other end! Which my pull was the slightest.
Despite me showing that it goes through there were having none of it, i was submitted a complaint and with their own guidance stating a slight pull was allowed! but got told it's old gudiance (which i stated why is it still up on their tech site!, and there tech team even said a slight pull was allowed) I then asked for the guidance the RM staff work towards when putting it through the template and got told, it's an internal doc and can't show me! So my question was how are us customers meant to knwo what guidance to follow. and the answer it had to be the size stated on website! I did give up on this one as i was going in circles.
But this whole surcharge thing is not right and not being transparent. I imagine alot of sellers have probably got/are getting stung with wrongly applied surcharges. I for one always challenge as i put my items through templates, weigh each item (noting it on packaging) so confident i did nothing wrong.
So echo what you said re challenging, if you know it's wrong! they shouldn't be getting away with this, onto top of that adding a green surcharge now, Peak surcharge, Fuel surcharge and the price hikes.
Rant over 🙂
