[OT] Cheap postage

pamela a écrit :

At a car boot and a bit sceptical - I bought a pile of pre-franked envelopes for TNT Post, marked 'delivered by Royal Mail' for just a few pence. All had a return address on them, which needed deleting. As said, I was sceptical, but I have had none returned as not delivered. They cost just a few pence each.

But you have broken the law. Send him down.

Cheers

Just noticed this one:

That document quotes (on page 7) the same prices as I said I was paying.

Page 5 is no different to what I said.

I get the same with electronic parts from China via Ebay. Often with a total cost little more than UK postage would be for the same item. They do take several weeks to arrive - but are delivered at the local end by the PO. I suppose there might be some form of reciprocal arrangement with China - but can't see 'us' posting things in that direction as much.

If the sender of this item from China paid 74p (as I would have to) for second class postage for the UK portion of the delivery then there isn't much left!

I just got a card from moonpig.com. They are based in Guernsey, the envelope was not franked, it had a Guernsey stamp on it that someone had licked and stuck on. (It was cancelled)

AIUI it's a troll on the postal treaties. Countries accept international mail on the basis that money from sending mail from a country pays for deliveries into that country: no money changes hands internationally.

This was fine in the days of sending letters, because most letter traffic is two-way, so senders balance out receivers. It also balances out different costs reasonably well: it costs more to send and deliver mail in Switzerland (where wages are high) than in Mali (where they aren't).

It doesn't work when the traffic is mostly one-way - Royal Mail are delivering this stuff for free and there's nothing they can do about it: jacking up the price of letters or packets to China won't help them.

What I can't quite work out is the shipping method... I suspect this is going air freight filling up unused spaces on flights (possibly commercial flights), which is why the timeline can be so variable. Going sea freight is about 30-35 days which is within the time estimate, but many things arrive quicker than this. Perhaps sea freight is used at busy periods of the year.

My most recent delivery from a Hong Kond seller was posted in Vientiane, Laos and others from Phillipines and Malaysia, so there's obviously something more complicated going on.

Theo (who generally buys from a UK seller if possible, but some stuff simply isn't available)

That shows that for 2nd class the price for a small item sent 2nd class can be as low as 37p, a good bit lower than the 55p for using a stamp and 64p for a "large" item. I suppose that some of the items sold on eBay for around a pound actually only cost a few pence each in bulk, so that there is still some profit even after postage and packing, but there cannot be much.

What has surprised me recently is the speed of delivery: in the last fortnight I've ordered from two separate eBay traders smallish low-value items and chosen the cheapest postal option (one was post free, meaning included in the price). In both cases the estimated delivery time was

3-5 days. In fact both were delivered the day after I ordered, and one in just over 12 hours from placing the order. One was delivered by Amazon (but that wasn't where I ordered it from) and one by Yodel. If this happens frequently, and people get to know, then hardly anyone will pay extra for 1st class postage or for Amazon's premium delivery service. My guess is that Amazon are gearing up for the delivery of fresh supermarket produce, but I don't know about Yodel.

There are discounts for franked mail and for online business account holders. Large customers may also get discounts for supplying the mail pre-sorted by post code. If you do enough business with Royal Mail, you can get to negotiate your own prices.

I'm sure that the big corporations get a good discount but big corporations don't tend to be the sellers I have had cheap & small packets from. Some of the vendors (in the UK) are not much more than a home business and yet even they seem to be paying little for postage.

I scanned the pdf for what you're referring to and saw "37p" on pages 7 and 9.

How does a vendor qualify to use "Account (OBA code BPL)" as mentioned on page 7?

Similarly for "Mailmark Franking" on page 9?

I know is some poor soul, who recently sent me a small lightweight item which fitted in an ordinary envelope, paid a whopping ?2.70. Yet others pay much less.

I'm interested because, in the end, the buyer pays the cost of delivery.

Dave Plowman (News) wrote

In fact for much less than the local cost of the postage much of the time.

Yeah, never understood that bit. Why China chooses to effectively send them for no charge to the sender and just haves them sit in a warehouse for weeks as part of that deal.

Corse there is and always has been. That's why some of the junk mail operations mail comes from some obscure country which just happens to currently have the cheapest postal charge.

Yes, but there is no alternative with international mail. Its just not practical to have the postal cost set for every single destination based on what the destination country charges the sending country to send it. They basically just deliver whatever shows up and get the same deal with the stuff that goes the other way.

That would mean that the Republic of Bongo Bongo could accept containers full of mail destined for the UK from, say the US, and then require the UK post office to delivery it.

In return, Bongo Bongo receives a dozen dusty Christmas cards from the UK to deliver in a year. Come to think of it that's almost what seems to happen.

It starts to explain why some vitamins I recently ordered from New York came via Sweden.

Don't go there!

Yes and that is in fact how some of the bulk spam mail operations and magazine subscriptions do it.

It is indeed what happens with the places that currently have the cheapest postal charges.

And there is indeed a real incentive to have the cheapest postal charges for international mail because that way you get containers stuffed with mail that you can charge that for each item in the container.

And why the spam bulk mail often comes from some obscure country. Magazine subs too.

So when I pay an extortionate price to send a letter in the UK, I might be paying for the loss the post office makes when it delivers mail to UK addresses from Bongo Bongo.

In a feat of perverse logic, I might conclude I have to buy goods from overseas which use super cheap shipping in order to cover the ripoff cost of second class mail within the UK. Or something like that. :-)