Courier Services

If you want to know the in’s and out’s of courier services, here’s the tricky bit – the detail! This can really be a minefield. There are so many options out there that most people don’t quite know where to start. There are some genuinely good websites that allow you to type in the weight and dimensions of your parcel and then you can get the price and delivery time. There are, of course, down sides to each solution. The main one with this is that you have to pay up front in advance before you know what service you will genuinely receive and to obtain the best price you have to stay in all day waiting for the delivery to be collected. There are some that now offer a timed delivery collection but you do have to pay over the odds for this. The whole point of going to one of these online brokerage companies is to actually pay a much reduced fee.

Other options, of course, are opening your own courier account. Many of the courier companies have strengths and weaknesses in different areas, which is also another good reason to use a broker, whether it’s an online one or a local one to you. Also setting up your account can be quite a time expensive operation.  And your account manager will be expecting a certain volume of couriers to be going through their systems to be able to offer you prices anything close to what you could get via a broker.

If you are sending out large volumes then setting up your own account may be a good option. However, I would recommend, in fact, still using a broker simply because you would need to be able to have an account with an array of different couriers companies to be able to get the best service depending on what it is you’re sending.

For example, if an item is 3 meters long we know which courier to place it with. If an item is particularly fragile we also know we would use a different courier for that shipment. If a product needs to be insured or requires a timed delivery then again we probably would use someone different still. If the products to be dispatched are second hand we would use a different company yet again. Having this in-depth knowledge of all the courier companies certainly helps us provide our customers with the best possible service by know which way to send their goods out.

As a very quick rundown, we can give you the reasons why we would choose one courier over another.

Parcel Force automatically insures consignments up to £250.00 and also insures items if they are second hand. Parcelforce is not by any means the cheapest way of sending goods by courier, however, with this built in insurance and the ability to extend it even on items that are second hand makes it a very favorable option for people selling on eBay.

UPS. I don’t know if you will have noticed but UPS vans themselves are a completely different shape. This stems from the American system; UPS is an American company and they have matched the truck shape here in the UK. This is because they actually have parcel shelves inside the trucks, something none of the other couriers do. So for anything very fragile we would tend to always use UPS. On the whole, they are a lot more careful with items and because of the different handling process, in our experience things arrive in better condition. They are however, more expensive.

TNT use extremely large trucks even on small rounds which allows you the flexibility of pickups of extremely large volumes even at short notice, something other companies can’t necessarily do. They tend to have a later pickup time which means you can tie it in better with your end of day instead of rushing to get items ready for mid afternoon. Price wise they’re comparable to the other main courier companies but where they’re particularly good is deliveries to the Benelux countries for international couriers, quite simply because TNT is a Dutch company.

Fed-Ex is extremely good value for money and are flexible in terms of the size of parcel and weight. They are also ultra competitive on any shipments going to the States or Canada. In fact, many of the other courier companies use Fed-Ex to actually send their own shipments.

DHL is a company that is generally used for people who are brand sensitive. In our experience, they are very good but the value for money they represent is not necessarily as competitive as other companies.

We also use local courier companies as well as a service called DX (Document Exchange), which is a 7 p.m. collection and pre 9 a.m. delivery service for members of the DX Exchange, they also offer a service which is equivalent to Royal Mail special delivery. This service is particularly useful if there are problems with the Royal Mail postal service, notably industrial action, and we can immediately push all our post through this system.

Finally, Same Day Courier Services, for extremely urgent, time sensitive deliveries we can insure that a dedicated vehicle is dispatched immediately to collect and then deliver your item the same day. This particular service is priced on the number of miles to the actual delivery point.

I hope this gives you some feel for the various courier services available. It would be an extremely lengthy task detailing all the terms and conditions of every single courier in this section and probably not particularly useful to you as we really do recommend using a specialist broker service. If you’re not sure of the best way of sending an iten it then just give us a call and speak to us on 01732 840 600 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              01732 840 600      end_of_the_skype_highlighting or drop us an email at info@postandpackinguk.com