Royal Mail Postage prices gone up today - Will the rise affect you on eBay?

[Callidus]

NoneOther - £2 isn't excessive as you don't have the foggiest on the original cost of my items being sent.

I dont work those figures out in my head a program does it for me so YES. £2 is the amount mine would need to increase to make the same amount of money.!

[cortex]

Im my personal opinion, Hermes (the delivery company, not the parisian fashion house) SUCK!!! in terms of delivery they are a total nightmare and in terms of being a customer...they took 4-5 days to deliver a small packet.

Everyone knew the price was going up so the smart thing to have done was to spend £1000+ on stamps....like i did .... and save around £400+ and save time in the crappy post office

[wot was that]

alot of ebay customers will gain if sellers are honest and pass on the savings when customers buy more than one items, sellers who do not offers postage discounts only have themselves to blame for sales going down if they dont pass on savings, as you shouldnt make a profit from postage, we all know how cheap packaging is, so theres no excuse there, offer postage discounts and your sales will probably go up

[bicawi]

Originally Posted by NoneOther

As I said I don't get what all the fuss is about, it happens every year.

In two weeks time the buyers will take no notice and carry on buying regardless.

Sellers are their own worst enemies sometimes, seeing problems where none actually exist instead of just getting on with it.

Every business, everywhere has cost increases every year, that's the way of the world.

This does not happen each year. My postal costs have increased by 55% since Saturday. I have sold the same item for years. 1st class recorded for a VERY SMALL, very light (70g) box was £2.35 last week. This week it's £3.65 and there is no way around this apart from shaving off a few pence and sending everything 2nd class recorded. So, this week alone, the postal costs have increased by more than they have done in total over the last 8 years put together as I have been selling/sending this particular item for 8 years.

Increases are indeed the way of the world. However, demand is related to costs and demand has now fallen.

[NoneOther]

I'm not talking about how much the percentage increase was.

Royal Mail increase their postal charges every April, that's a fact and people running a business should be aware of upcoming increases and plan how they are going to deal with it before hand.

RM announced and published the increases 2 months ago so it should hardly have come as a surprise to anyone.

I can only assume that people are trying to make a profit from their postal charges otherwise this would not be an issue unless of course your are offering free P&P as I have said several times before.

[james169]

Originally Posted by NoneOther

Unless you are offering free postage I don't see how this can be as the customer pays the cost, your profit I would assume comes from the item sold.

If you are making a profit from what you are charging for delivery then I would say that you must be overcharging.

Customers expect to pay a fair cost for delivery so an increase in those costs is unlikely to upset them when the whole country knows that RM have raised the costs substantially.

Don't get me wrong I'm not criticising your business model as such but imo it is not good business practise to rely on profits from delivery charges.

I offer free 1st class postage and have done on all my items for some time now, the postage cost is built into the BIN price, which I will have to alter to reflect the increase in postage

I do offer to send items recorded delivery but this is at an additional cost which the buyer must pay for, perhaps only 2% of all sales choose to have the item sent recorded, or if they have bought a few and the sale price warrants it I will pay for it to be sent recorded myself to prevent any claims of non delivery!

[ebabe]

Originally Posted by eternity4u

I would go with Hermes. My packing are royal mail recorded. I rather pay Hermes.

I like Herms too if im sending out larger items, very reasonable prices.

[GreenBean]

Originally Posted by Ebayorbust

Can't see how folks are losing money over this. Postal prices went up for everyone.

I spend approx £300 a week on postage. I've stocked up on over £4k in stamps so should make roughly an extra £1200 in profit over the next 10 weeks.

Did you read what happened at some of the POs? RM deliberately did not supply enough stamps to prevent consumers from doing just as you managed.

[Ebayorbust]

Originally Posted by GreenBean™

Did you read what happened at some of the POs? RM deliberately did not supply enough stamps to prevent consumers from doing just as you managed.

Yes, I did read that. Fortunately, I have a good relationship with the staff in both of my local POs, so making a few large purchases in the weeks running up to the increase was fairly easy.

I bought all mine for "personal" use but I'm sure many people bought them to turn a quick buck on ebay.

Sent from my GT-P1000 using Tapatalk

[GreenBean]

Ingenuity of customers

[johnnyleeds]

Greetings space cadets!

Well I was about to come blazing in here screaming and shouting about how the prices for paying postage with Paypal seem to have shot up. It seems however people already have been rattling on about it for a few days. I knew the cost of stamps was going up, but somehow in my feeble mind I didnt equate this to covering postage via Paypal / Royal Mail...

Anyway as my current auctions that ended still had postage prices for previous Royal Mail prices I'm either gonna have to bear the extra 50p etc per item cost myself - it only on about 30 items, or as I've been doing quite recently use the Collect+ courier service - the one where you can drop items off at a newsagents / off licence etc.

I've used this a few times and although it isnt as quick as Royal Mail first class I've not had a problem with it. They are only for UK delivery and there are a few different postage options, if your item weighs under 2kg and will fit in a jiffy bag envelope then you can post it for £3.99, up to 5kg and in a box (size restrictions apply) £4.99, and then up to 10kg for £6.99.

As for Hermes, well let me tell you a tale, I used to work for them in 2009 at their head office in Morley near Leeds, they were a pretty amateur operation (nice offices though) and I know they have a lot of complaints. Despite this I've used them quite a few times in the past and never had a problem (touch wood!), unfortunately it can depend on which courier finally ends up with your parcel. Put it this way, if you are sending a Macbook Air, dont just send it in its own box, a few mm of brown paper might be the difference between it arriving or not... and not just because the courier may / may not be bent, but they have a policy of jamming parcels behind wheelie bins, leaving them with 'helpful' passers by etc etc.

I still dont know who I'm going to use to send the majority of small items I sell, I guess it will have to be Royal Mail still, and just raise the cost of postage in my listings, which I'm sure will alienate any buyers. If anyone hears of anything better please let me know.

ta!

Johnny