All ecommerce solutions have the same process once their customer clicks on the “Process Order" button - delivery. For many larger ecommerce businesses as a part of their ecommerce solution they can put money towards the service to ensure that their customers are receiving the products affordably, on time and undamaged. But what about the smaller companies?

Royal Mail Price Hike and Smaller Businesses

A report released by is4proft on the 28^th January was one of the first this year to link the Royal Mail price hike to small businesses. A lot of small businesses rely on the postal services. Whether they have integration with a fulfilment company or not this will affect them the most.

“Ofcom is currently considering plans put forward by the postal service that could see second-class stamp prices soar from 36p to 55p, and unlimited price increases for first-class stamps until 2018"

They also reported that Royal Mail suffered a £120 million loss last year and the changes will come into place this year. Their reasoning for doing this is “traditional mail services have been badly affected by the use of email, the internet and mobile phones." The Forum of Private Business (FPB) has approached Watchdog to look into the matter. They believe that the small businesses will be hit hard during this current difficult economic time and many may be unaware of the proposals made by Ofcom. This would be damaging to ecommerce websites too.

A spokeswoman for Royal Mail has said that they are waiting for the outcome of Ofcom's consultation and no final decisions have been made.

As of yesterday Sky News, The Telegraph and others reported on this topic. Sky News' story reported no changes on the matter. Ofcom are still yet to finalise a stamp price for 2012. I agree with the quote from Robert Hammond, director of postal policy and regulation at Consumer Focus; he said if the customers have to pay more, then Royal Mail should provide a more reliable, efficient and value for money service.

Delivering your ecommerce solution

We can provide you with guidance and the best possible methods to ensure that the orders are being sent to your customers. We always make sure that the shipping integrations we provide are in the working order that our ecommerce clients would want them to be.

Call us today on 0845 838 2700 or email at sales@advansys.co.uk and find out if we can improve your web fulfillment requirements.