Choosing Your Delivery Company for Business Post

Last Updated: August 22, 2009

Delivery Company

If you are looking for a better service than Royal Mail, you can try switching to a rival package company. There are a number of rival companies, each with varying costs; depending on the size of package, delivery service and number of packages you send.

The costs of the rival services are generally higher than the standard Royal Mail or Parcelforce prices, but you could find this to be worth it if you get a better service and/or more reliable deliveries.

There are no guarantees that one company will be better than any other, so you need to weigh up any information that you find, as well as experiences of similar businesses, the costs and customer service levels; before you make a final decision. You can of course send different items through different delivery companies, for example; sending all unimportant mail by Royal Mail standard post, and all important mail through a rival’s special delivery post.

Links to a number of alternative delivery companies are available in the links section of this article.

Letter Delivery Choice

The Royal Mail are no longer the only provider of letter services, several other firms now handle a large amount of mail. Although Royal Mail still handles over 98% of letter deliveries; the single biggest postal user in the country (Royal Bank of Scotland) has switched to a rival company.

The letters are picked up and sorted by the rival company, and transported to the local delivery centres where Royal Mail posts them; meaning that the letters are still delivered in the usual way.

Until 1^st January 2006 rivals could only operate in batches of 4000 letters or more, making the services unusable for most small businesses. However, since this date rival services are gradually becoming much more widely available. One business-to-business mail company, DX Services, is installing its post boxes at the 96 franchise outlets of Mail Boxes Etc; this provides a viable option for SME’s to switch some of their letter post.

Links

Here are links to a number of other parcel or package carriers, these are not specific recommendations; but are here to help you pick the one that is right for you.

DX Services (Business to Business)