Many British online stores choose Royal Mail as their parcel delivery service when they first start out as it's what they know. But as you grow, alternatives to Royal Mail could offer benefits.
Find out more about Asendia's international parcel services
If you’re an eCommerce business that’s new to sending parcels overseas in volume, you may be worrying if you really can trust an alternative to Royal Mail with your customers’ orders. Will it arrive on time? Will it arrive at all? Will it be damaged along the way? And will it be insured?
Trusting a courier or postal delivery service is indeed something that only comes with time. But what alternatives are there to Royal Mail if you’re not happy with the service they offer or if you simply want to offer your shoppers choice.
Here are a few you could try instead:
Collect+
While Collect+ expects you do a little of the work, they do offer some good services that will give you peace of mind while your parcel is on its way to your customer. So they can be considered a Royal Mail International parcel services alternative.
Yes, you’ll have to drop off your package to one of their collection points, this is usually a local convenience store, but once it’s been accepted and scanned you and your customer can track its movements online.
Deliveries with Collect+ can be a little slow but this is reflected in some reasonable pricing, and they will cover damage or loss up to £50 for free.
ParcelHero
OK, so adding ParcelHero here is a little bit of a cheat as they’re not couriers themselves, per se. Instead, they will use a number of carriers at prices they’ve negotiated so you can get a good deal.
They will make sure you have door to door service and free insurance up to £50.
Whistl
Offering door-to-door services for everything from letters to large parcels, Whistl could well be a good Royal Mail International parcel services alternative.
They also offering leafleting services too. So, be mindful of how their focus might not be fully on getting your parcel delivered and might be more on upselling additional services.
MyHermes
As one of the UK’s most well-known couriers, it’s MyHermes’ price that is a big draw for them with rates that are highly competitive for door to door, and a chance to save even more if you drop your package off at a MyHermes Parcelshop’.
What does let them down though is their free insurance only goes up to £25 and the list of items not covered is quite long. But they can be considered a Royal Mail International parcel services alternative.
Asendia
What the previous recommendations have in common is that while they are able to manage B2C and international, they’re mostly geared up for C2C and domestic and you need to do a bit of work to get your packages into their system.
A genuine alternative to Royal Mail's International parcel services would be a service that is well-rehearsed in the needs of an e-commerce business, can automate a lot of the processes and can deliver B2C packages or bulk orders across the globe with ease.
Asendia excels at this, offering competitively priced international deliveries across 200 countries using 1,5000 employees at 35 global locations. They even have fulfilment centres, warehouses to store your stock in locations near your customers in the UK, Italy, Singapore, USA, Australia, and New Zealand.
Plus their systems can easily integrate into multiple e-commerce platforms such as eshopworld, Shopify, Magento, and Big Commerce.
Drop us a line to see if we can help deliver what you need.
Asendia's international parcel services for online stores large and small
We handle the fulfilment and shipping of international orders for some of the biggest etail brands in the world and hundreds of smaller online stores too.
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