Royal mail insufficient post ???
Summary: jake-bullet-cybernautics is experiencing issues with a customer being charged £3.40 for insufficient postage on a parcel that seems to be properly labeled as small. podlingsmum suggests challenging the fee with Royal Mail, sharing a similar experience of having a fee refunded. However, pillarboxred and rainbowtrax express frustration with the difficulty of contacting Royal Mail, recommending using their online complaints form instead. just-got-personal and padanpcparts discuss switching to other services due to recurring surcharge issues with Royal Mail. pillarboxred shares personal challenges with parcel lockers and additional charges.
I've got an annoyed customer that has been charged £3.40 for insufficient post. But as far as I can tell there's nothing wrong with it, and customer reports "i had to pick it up from the post office and pay for the postage which was £3.40. They said it shouldn't need any postage paying but they wouldn't let me have the package until i paid for it"
There's a fee to pay sticker, but no box why ticked.
I bought a small parcel 1 kg tracked 48 label via ebay. Item is 400g, package size 40cm x 25cm x 6cm
Anyone got an idea what's going on, and more to the point who I complain to?
jake-bullet-cybernautics
OPyesterday at 6:36 PMFinal outcome: hoops jumped, and they're sending me some useless stamps. Turns out if they do you for less than £10 it's their policy that you get a book of stamps.
(I have stamps coming out of my ears from being on mailagents)
pillarboxred
·1 week agoI've had this too. In the end, I just paid it. For me, it is a problem with sending items from a Parcel Locker. The parcel locker was full so I selected a larger size of cupboard and had to pay the difference ALTHOUGH MY ITEM WAS ONLY 10 CM AND THE MAXIMUM IS 16 CM. MONEY WENT FROM MY ACCOUNT, AND THE BUYER WAS SURCHARGED SO I HAD TO REIMBURSE HIM TOO! The following item I sent from the Parcel Locker on 24th August seems to have vaporised and I had to do a 100% refund on that.
just-got-personal
·1 week agoI had a spate of these about a month ago. All of them spurious in my opinion as I have sent thousands of the same packages out over the years without this issue.
Royal Mail must be incentivising depots to meet a quota of surcharges or something like that as this can't be a coincidence.
I have simply switched to 'inpost'... They are cheaper, no worse than any of the others, including RM at delivering without issues.
Having used them for a month I can honestly say that I have not experienced any higher level of problems than we get from any courier... Just saved 20p or so from every package sent out.
padanpcparts
·6 days agoYeah, Royal Mail have history of this sort of thing.
podlingsmum
·1 week agoAre there any details if you look up the tracking? Is it at all possible the label came off the package?
jake-bullet-cybernautics
OP1 week agoCustomer has sent a photo with my label + charge label stuck on the package.
I did a bit more digging and £3.40 suggests they're measuring it as a medium. It's a small at 40cm, unless you measure diagonally on the package to get a bigger length.
I've sent out about 60 of this item packed the same way, so if it was medium I'd have had more than 1 get charged.
podlingsmum
·1 week agoIt is worth calling Royal Mail to challenge this. Your buyer could help here if they are willing to send you photos of the box being measured with a ruler. It's not meant to be a diagonal measurement. It is within the max dimensions of 45 x 35 x 16. I was able to challenge an unjust fee that was put on a normal letter that they claimed was a large letter. I got refunded the fee.
pillarboxred
·1 week agoHave you tried calling Royal Mail recently? It is not possible. I spent an afternoon trying. RM know that users need to make a decision about the economic use of their time and will mostly give up. RM has been bought by a billionaire with 400 companies. It's not inherited wealth so to get that rich you need to know how to grab money.
podlingsmum
·1 week agoYes I last phoned Royal Mail on August 11th. I admit I waited quite a while for them to answer and was in a queue. If my time costs money then I may have a different feeling about it, but I had spare time.
pillarboxred
·1 week agoThey can take advantage of people with "spare time". Time is the one thing we can't get back.
jake-bullet-cybernautics
OP1 week ago · EditedCustomer sent me this. But how do I contact royal mail?
rainbowtrax
·1 week agoIt's pointless trying to speak to them. Even if you get through to a person, you get nowhere. You need to go straight to their complaints form here: https://help.royalmail.com/s/complaints. They probably still have no facility to submit evidence on the form itself as they want to make it as difficult as possible so that you give up and go away but just fill in the details of what they've done as your first point of contact.
just-got-personal
·1 week agoI gave up and went away... I only use them for Highlands etc, Places the couriers don't want to go to.
Bad business model RM, you might have got a surcharge out of me but you have lost hundreds of packages since.