Dexter Cattle For Sale Discussion Board

Posted: **Thu Feb 12, 2009 10:00 pm**

Does anyone who does mail order on a fairly regular basis have any couriers that they are happy to recommend?
After trying quite a few over the years, all seem to find it impossible to be 100% reliable. I now never agree to deliver anything on a Friday after suffering from " knock off early on Friday syndrome" so that beef has sat in warehouses over weekends with the poor excuse that either they could not find the property or that " no one was in"! I had one lady stay in her garden by her gate all day ( she liked her beef!!) only to be told that she had not been at home, but no, they had not put a card through the door to say they had tried to deliver. To cap it all, she only lived half a mile from the depot!

Incase you are wondering, the parcels do have
" perishable, please ring ......... if not delivered immediately"

Anyway, I now use Royal Mail Special Delivery, who are extremley good, know how to use the postcodes and are quick to refund if ever there is any delay. However, drawback is the cost. They have just 2 price bands for the service I require, so parcels muct be under 2 kg or under 10kg.

I obviously do not have my customers trained very well, as no one wants standard boxes and therefore weights are a challenge for smallish orders. Whilst I do try to encourage them to increase their orders to make the cost of P&P worthwhile, the cost does lead to a percentage of lost customers who decide it is too prohibitive.

So roughly, what this long, rambling topic is about is getting some good recommendations, as going on courier websites takes forever without getting the vital costs.
I won't hold my breath.............!

Posted: **Fri Feb 13, 2009 9:58 am**

Hi Penny,
In my 'proper job' we are on a daily collection from a courier and can send up to 20 consignments a day. We have used almost all of the companies that do national and international deliveries, the reason for having used so many is that when you have problems the only course of action is to move your business to someone else. None are 100%, the best tell you that they have about a 98% success rate when these companies deliver about a million packages a week that means that about 20,000 are either not delivered, miss routed or at worst lost. That is about the best you will get.
Prices are something that they will not give on the web as it would depend on how many consignments that you would expect to send and your location. As we are 'good customer' we have rates that reflect that, we have rates for 1kg, 5kg then up to 20kg. The 20kg is a before 3pm and costs £7.50, every kg above is an extra 24p, I must stress that these are negotiated rates and we pay by direct debit, we are also on a large busy industrial estate and TNT in particular have a lorry just for the estate, it is that busy. All of the companies that deliver and collect here are fighting each other for business.
I doubt that you send enough consignments for the courier companies to want to 'bid' for your business and also the driver would probably have to make a specific journey just to pick up your one package making you a less attractive customer.
A few to try would be Interlink, TNT and City link, they would most likely want to come and see you to disscuss your requirements. Good luck!

Posted: **Fri Feb 13, 2009 2:00 pm**

I cant believe you think royal mail are any good!!

Parcel Farce are the worst excuse for a company i have ever had the displeasure of dealing with. the local post office is good, the local posties are good, its just everything else. (bitter because they cost me a customer and £70 in lost meat a month ago)

Business post are the shining stars of the courier business to me. we arent big customers but we do send 10-12 meat packages a week and as yet they have never lost 1 in 16 months. we have 2 late deliveries and several brocken boxes, but the customers have always been satisfied the contents were ok. the local driver is a star.
he could not get up our snowy track on wednesday, and could not get hold of me on the phone so he walked up and took the parcel and walked back again with a 25kg parcel!! i just arrived back as he was pulling out of our road for him to tell me his tale, he laughed about it. but it shows!!

up to 10kg 7.99 25p per kilo over that. they then have a bag service if you can get something into their set sized bags its £4.99 5.99 and 6.99 we quite often use these.

have used city link, they are a lottery, uncaring, uninterested, and prices went up suddenly.

tnt do a pay as you go 9.99 for upto 10kg but i think they mainly deliver to business adresses.

couriers are only as good as their worst driver.

dominic

Posted: **Tue Feb 17, 2009 7:04 pm**

I've never had much faith in Parcelforce since they returned a pallet saying they couldn't find the delivery address - I had to explain to them where the town was - Maldon, Essex - let alone the individual address. They said they had never heard of Maldon.
I tried to send something by CityLink a few weeks ago. They said they had no means of weighing it and couldn't work out a price for UK delivery although they claimed they could send it to Germany if I wanted - I didn't.
DHL is expensive but usually OK, but they also lose things - only important stuff of course.

Posted: **Wed Feb 18, 2009 12:52 pm**

Thanks for all this useful imput. I don't use Parcelforce itself, I use the Royal Mail Special delivery service which I have been pleased with but costs £20.95 for up to 10kg exc.packaging, so rather prohibitive.
I did look at Business Post as they were recommended to me, but got no where on the website. Obviously I will have to ring them up and see what I rates I can get.

Dexter Cattle For Sale Discussion Board

Mail Order couriers