As STW is such a diverse place, thought I better ask here..

I’ve setup a new business selling a small and low value product. Currently I’m trying to find the cheapest postage rate, but not sure if there’s a go to provider I’m missing..

The majority (75%) of my products will be shipped in a box that has;
Dimmensions: 120x120x120mm
Weight: 600-750g
Value: zero and happy to send out replacements if lost

I should be shipping 40 units per week, but ought to increase to 200 per week in the coming months. Cheapest I’ve currently found is MyHermes with £2.60.

If anyone has any idea on where to start, that would be great!

Zero value? is this you?

Haha, genius! Amazing what people will pay for..
There is value to it, but I’m happy to absorb any loses in transit, hence zero value for postage reasons.

Well on a Royal Mail 48 on a business account you would be looking at £2.58

So the Hermes rate of £2.60 is pretty good as you will also have tracking I guess.

I did see a service a while ago that was £1 per parcel but you had to sign up to shipping 200 parcels a week. It was a fixed price irrelevant of if you only shipped 100 parcels.

Don’t always just look at price, also look to see what customers want. People trust Royal Mail and not companies like Hermes as much. Also as a small business you might find dropping parcels off at your local postoffice / sorting office easier than waiting for hermes to arrive.

We ship all our trousers from the post office.
This costs us £4.45 for tracked 24hr postage.

We do this because it is definitely helping keep the post office in our town open.

Others have offered us cheaper rates, but we like Satnam. And the post office.

Edit:: trousers cost a lot if they go missing. Though none have.

We ship all our trousers from the post office.

If you post some out by MyHermes can I have a £2.50 discount? 😆

If you post some out by MyHermes can I have a £2.50 £1.95 discount?

😀

If you post some out by MyHermes can I have a £2.50 discount?

If you pick them up from Drink? in Hebden Bridge, shipping is free and you get a free half pint!

Thanks for the replies- all info noted!
Problem is the product retails for £2-4, so adding £2.50 postage is significant. I could swallow the £0.50, but that’s still asking customers to pay £2 postage.

I suppose my other option is trying to sell this through stores, but for the most part I would have to go through wholesalers I would guess. I’ve got limited B2B knowledge and no doubt they’d want larger volumes than I can (currently) supply.

Can you get the packaging smaller and lighter. What is the product?

Possibly, but all the postal companies I’ve come across seem to have a fixed cost for small parcels (sub 1kg, under 300x200x10mm), so going smaller makes no difference to postal costs.

The product is handmade tiles, so requires some packaging to ensure they arrive in one piece and undamaged.

I could always build postage costs into product cost, but not too keen on doing that.

“Handmade” =/= £2/£4

Indeed, most raw materials UK sourced and made locally.
I’m filling a niche for an area of the art community.
Sales are good, but I need to offer postage as I’m getting lots of inquiries about posting.

Have you tried the Post Office?
I remember when they went private the cost of sending a small parcel virtually halved…
Tracking adds a quid, IIRC.

With Royal Mail price is based on weight and size. If you can get your tiles in a large letter box then you will get the price down a fair bit. As you say with couriers, etc they work on weight and not size so much.

I would start off simple and offer a Royal Mail price. It might seem expensive but then again if people are asking for postal then I don’t think they will be surprised by a £3 charge. I wouldn’t soak up some of the cost at this stage until your business takes off more.

Have a look at Large letter sized boxes – they can then go in regular post and fit though a standard letter box (if the weight doesn’t creep up) and the postage is less than a pound. You should be able to If you’re not worried about replacing them a breakage every now and again won’t be an issue. Allowed thickness is something like 22mm and should be anough to get some bubble wrap in the box and should limit damge acceptably.

Ignore that – just looked again at the weight.

Thanks again for responses.
I need to keep it in a cardboard postal box to protect them, I think.
Royal Mails going rate is £2.80. I’ll give them a call about business rates and see what they come up with.

We’ve been looking at this and Royal Mail Large letters win for small items, I think the max weight is 750g so you should just creep in. It isn’t a standard package / envelope size but some companies make packaging to fit the max large letter size