Tomorrow (Oct 21st), Royal Mail workers will strike (“industrial action” is another name for it) and severely impact the delivery of orders in the UK delivered through Royal Mail. While the strike progresses the management of Royal Mail is working hard to keep portions on the service open and functioning. As such, we have built contingency plans that will allow Shipwire to deliver shipments directly into the Royal Mail sortation facility. This means that your orders will ship as normal from the warehouse.
Once at the Royal mail sort facility, we do not believe that final delivery will be completed; however, Shipwire will have moved your orders as far along as we can. We have posted to our blog a complete guide to Royal Mail shipping order management during the strike.
With the minute by minute changes in the situation, Shipwire’s service level guarantees have been suspended for Royal Mail orders during the strike and Shipwire merchants should expect delays in delivery.
This update changes our previous handling in the following ways:
We had previously posted to our blog that we would be holding Royal Mail orders inside the Shipwire platform as our default handling. Now that we know that some Royal Mail sort facilities will continue to process inbound mail and parcels, Shipwire will be taking our merchants parcels to the UK sort facility to keep our merchant’s parcels processing as far as we can and not create a warehouse back-load.
This will get your orders into the Royal Mail systems and get your orders as far along as possible, hopefully by-passing some of the 3 week anticipated backlog being spoken about in the local UK news.
Clearly local delivery of orders will continue to be a problem; but, we are hoping this ensures your orders face the bare minimum of delays and your e-commerce systems (“Sell” tools) and customer updates (“Delight” tools) should continue to operate normally.
Posted by:
Nate Gilmore
Nate oversees our channel development and developer network, as well as our marketing and public relations. Previously, Nate was at Concentric, acquired by XO Communications, where he ran product management, sales and marketing. Over his six year career with Concentric, he developed dozens of new business channels, by initiating new products for small- and mid- size businesses, developing partner programs for those products, and working with web developers and systems integrators to provide ongoing support of those products. Nate has also held various legal positions in intellectual property and business law. He holds a B.A. in History, and a J.D., from Santa Clara University.
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