Royal Mail's theft in form of "surcharges"
Hi there,
We just received another email from Royal Mail in which they stated that we will be charged for a few items as they are not Large Letters but Small Parcels. This now continue every week for the last 2-3 months. It’s total absurd as the item is a kids t-shirt, tote bag and other clothing, mainly a single t-shirts and they fit into the LL format. We are furious as one of the surcharges for example is for a kids (5/6 years) t-shirt, which Royal Mail said is 7cm thick parcel.
Royal Mail can afford to ignore our emails and no luck with our account manager who is now promoted and can’t deal with us. I guess the job promotion came after she raised a particular amount of money in favor of Royal Mail.
I would like to know if someone has to deal with the same issues as we can’t afford to loose hundreds of £££ in fake surcharges. We were told to provide evidence without being specified what kind of evidence we need to provide. It’s time consuming job to write emails, take photos and search through our database for all the products. Can we charge Royal Mail for the time lost if we need to go through all this? For example to hire another person to do it and then forward the bill to Royal Mail?
It’s very easy someone in Royal Mail to send these fake surcharges as they are getting paid for the time being there, but no one pays this extra time to us in order to deal with this absurd accusations. On top of that we are still waiting for some answers about the Fuel Surcharges, as it seems like another way of getting more money from their customers - no one comes to collect the mail from us, instead we drop the bags daily into the Post Office or directly into the Sorting Office.
Thank you for the New Normal but I want the Old Normal back. For 13 years we never had such problems with Royal Mail.
Any ideas how we can deal with this issues?
Thanks
489 replies
Seller_7VbclcPFFRTnc
You can package up one of the tshirts and photo it going through the guide
Chances are, they are moving around in the packaging or being folded over on the conveyor belt
Seller_esvgLzKXw2YAl
At least one other thread about his kind of issue. It’s probably worth reading.
Seller_bi8rGHHcLpoVs
Also, you say Royal Mail is ignoring your emails, you need to raise the dispute through the Royal Mail Finance portal rather than emailing. We have never been ignored using this system.
Seller_EIkfX7Xycaq4H
Hi, Yes very frustrating and disheartening to keep getting these ridiculous charges everyday
There is a thread here that may help you :
Does not seem to matter which mailing centre your post goes to it is all the same, in the short term other than changing packaging or moving to another service ( Royal Mail unfortunately have the monopoly on Large Letters ) there is no much we can do however if we all complain to account managers and Finance dept at RM hopefully in the medium to long term it will change back to manual checks
If anyone does get any helpful guidance or news on changes from account managers please can you let us know here
Seller_y7wlA8Npjq1Or
Try switching to A4 size boxes that are large letter thickness. t shirt can fold over as much it likes it’ll still be a large letter thickness. Yes they are slightly heavier but shouldn’t effect much if your on average weight.
I stooped using poly bags because of the movement in the bag creating a parcel thickness leading to surcharges since switch i get the odd surcharge but normally a weight one rather than wrong size.
Seller_Um75lpkae2TCH
Does anyone know how to check what the surcharges are for? We seem to get surcharges varying from £7 to £40 each month but no breakdown of why? Majority of our items are large letter and we put large letters and small parcels into the same sack, because we understand this is ok as long as they’re the same postage class.
Seller_WMvaZxtViUiaq
I have been told by our RM account manager it is down to ‘soft packages’ folding over on the conveyor belts and going through the scanner. She suggested we insert a card into the package to stop this happening. We won’t be doing this. Another automated process, without any human intervention, and businesses just have to take the hit.
Seller_idCSjD35wINVo
We suffered the same. We paid out over £1000 in surcharges before we gave up with RM. Our LL could puff up in in the poly bags so when scanned they looked larger. One option was to stick everything down with lots of tape.
This wasn’t good for the planet and was costly and time consuming so it wasn’t worth it. We moved some items to FBA so RM will never get a penny for those again. Others we changed to packets rather than LL, they help bring the average weight of packets down under 1KG now so we save on all of those now.
Ultimately we want to put everything we send with RM as FBA. See how they like that.
Our account manager was useless, all he ever did was apologise, tell us to appeal and then explain about the wonderful new parcel facility opening in 2 years, size of 10 football pitches apparently. I just told him “So what? DPD have already got theirs up and running.”
Seller_2IqU6eYHmCUaV
Hi . I personally use brown sticky parcel tape on the outside of my large letters to stop the items inside moving around and becoming parcels . Seems to be working so far )) no surcharges here
