Royal Mail Integration

Customise the way you ship via Royal Mail with a custom shipping integration

 

 shipster royal mail integration diagram

 

Royal Mail is the oldest postal service and courier in Britain. It’s long history starts in 1516 when it was established by King Henry VIII. As of 2015, The company is entirely privately run and the state no longer owns any shares. Royal Mail’s greatest strength is reputation, and they are famous globally for their bright red post boxes which were introduced in the mid-1800s.


Whilst they are established and reliable they are also still relatively traditional. Their services have some historic limitations such as non-delivery on Sundays or Bank Holidays. Despite this, Royal Mail integrations are very popular with over a third of our clients choosing to integrate with the courier. Royal Mail have a far and thorough reach across the UK and are one of the only couriers that deliver to British oversea territories and international British Armed Forces bases. Another unique aspect of Royal Mail is that it is currently required by British law to have a ‘universal service’. This means the price to post items to anywhere in the UK is fixed as long as the parcels are below a certain dimension. This is in place until 2021.

 

How does our Royal Mail integration work?

Shipster pulls information about your Royal Mail orders from your warehouse management system. It uses this information to book in the shipment with Royal Mail directly, obtains a tracking number and prints a shipping label. The service chosen is customisable through the use of ‘rules’ that map certain features of your orders to trigger a variety of features.

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Create rules from dozens of conditions and commands

Example Shipping Rules

Sensitive Material

For certain items, automate your Shipster to print custom alerts, documents and warning labels. This may be helpful when packing sensitive or fragile items such as legal documents or technology. Pop-ups can also be triggered in these instances to warn or instruct warehouse staff.

Pop-Ups

Create custom pop-ups that are triggered for every order, or when certain conditions in an order are present. This is often used to ask packers how many parcels there are if an order is over a certain weight. The subsequent selection then affects how many labels Shipster prints.

Dangerous Items

Several rules are available to make the handling and shipping of dangerous goods as safe as possible. Products marked as dangerous or matching a particular product category can trigger Shipster to print certain shipping documentation, staff instructions and allocate the appropriate courier service.

Return Addresses

Switch between multiple return addresses to be included on labels and invoices. This is useful if you have more than one store in the same company and process the respective products from separate locations. Map certain data points on an order to trigger a different address.

Trim Fields

Sometimes, couriers can put limits on how long certain information fields can be such as phone number or email address. Using rules, set up your Shipster to automatically trim or replace these fields. These rules can also detect when certain special characters are present and remove/ replace them, for example a + in a phone number could be changed to 00.

Days of the Week

Program Shipster to choose different Royal Mail services based on the day of the week. For example, since Royal Mail do not deliver on Sundays, you may wish for certain Saturday orders to be sent on a next day service to ensure they arrive for Monday.

FAQs

Our Royal Mail integration is popular because both our clients and their customers trust the age-old organization. If your shipping needs and straightforward and consistent, Royal Mail can provide great, standard services for all your parcels. As well as being well connected across the UK, they can deliver to most countries in the world. 

Yes! Shipster has the function to print fully tracked Royal Mail return labels either manually or automatically by use of a shipping rule. These return labels can be printed individually, or embedded into another custom PDF document, such as an invoice.

Parcelforce began as the division of Royal Mail responsible for shipping parcels. Whilst still using Royal Mail’s infrastructure today, ParcelForce has been its own company since 1986, offering their own range of domestic and international services, specialising more in express delivery options especially for heavy packages.

Very easily. You can upgrade or downgrade your licenses whenever you want by emailing Shipster support. Shipster is designed to be flexible as your business grows and changes. Licenses are required per courier per PC, and are charged monthly. 

Our team is based in the UK but may of the software’s users are not. We welcome clients from all over the world, and Shipster is used by companies as far away as Australia. Our support phone line is manned between 10am-5pm GMT, but we offer email support outside of those hours. 

If a courier’s API is set up for paperless trading, then Shipster can send all customs documentation electronically. Most commonly these are commercial invoices and CN22s. Shipster can also be set up to print physical customs documents when paperless trading is not possible (some countries do not facilitate it). 

Feedback

Customers that use our courier integrations

CHO Fashion & Lifestyle

CHO Fashion & Lifestyle

Gareth O'Rourke, Head of E-Commerce

"We have been using Shipster for 18 months and it has literally transformed our warehouse department. We have managed to fully integrate with our three main couriers and significantly improve the speed, efficiency and accuracy at which the warehouse team are able to push parcels out of the building. We have managed to do this with the same number in our despatch team as what we had 18 months ago, even though parcel volumes have gone from 70,000 to 120,000 parcels."

DLSB

DLSB

Daniel Mitchell, Operations Manager

"Shipster for us was like a breath of fresh air with regards to our old system. From the first initial onboarding meeting with Shipster, we could tell they were going to be a company that we could rely on to support our business growth. I have found that no request is too big or small, I have found the team at Shipster are always available which in comparison to our old system is a blessing."