Alternatives to Royal Mail – myHermes
by Chris Dawson
myHermes are owned by Hermes UK (formerly Parcelnet) who operate their own delivery network, delivering over 100 million parcels each year on behalf of some of the UK’s largest on-line retailers such as NEXT, Freemans and Grattons.
They have made significant investments in their network recently with a £10m national distribution hub in Nuneaton designed to handle even greater volumes of traffic with greater efficiency. Most significantly they have recently deployed Europe’s largest wireless rollout – some 7,500 hand-held terminals which means that their services are fully tracked from collection to customer signature, should they choose that option – live updates are also available on their website.
They operate a 0-15kg, 3-5 day door to door courier service which is a little slower than the Royal Mail, however their 7,500 ‘lifestyle’ couriers are very flexible and can deliver at convenient times such as in evenings and weekends when others can’t. This can eliminate the days of receiving drop cards and queuing in sorting offices on a weekend.
The service is very simple:
- You choose the day you’d like myHermes to pick up your parcel (no need to take time away from your eBay business with trips to the post office)
- Going out? Just enter a safe place where you’ve left your parcel(s) when you order
- myHermes will make 3 attempts to deliver to your customer
- Track it on-line
- myHermes also offer the UK’s cheapest door to door parcel delivery service with prices starting £3.99 for 0-2kg.
To get started you’ll need to open an account with myHermes, they accept PayPal, as well as all major credit & debit cards.
18 Responses on "Alternatives to Royal Mail – myHermes"
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So for the vast majority of sellers not a viable option, when you’re used to selling items which cost 60p to post plus a jiffy bag.
Thanks Chris. They will come in handy for the bottles that we normally post out with RM.
I’m sure you’ll still get better service via Special Delivery even during the strike (they had managers delivering the specials during the last big strike). Might also be worth giving your local mail center a call to see if you can drop off mail on days when there is no collections. My local post office was having post collected (once a day instead of three times) when drivers were not collecting, over the last few months.
Not sure if I was just lucky but got through the last strike no problem (no negs etc.). The biggest worry to me is that people stop ordering rather then items not being delivered.
“Biggest worry to me is that people stop ordering” …and that’s exactly the point I tried to address on the BBC News 24 segment last night
and you did a good job Chris. Hopefully both sides will give an inch or two & we can all have a bumper Christmas
Will it be covered by PayPal’s seller protection using only the basic servic without signture?
Chris, thank you for the MyHermes link, that will be a lifesaver during a strike, at least for my book and painted-ware sales.
Any suggestions for carriers who would offer compensation for glass items carried please? Glass is one of the items they don’t offer compensation on if it’s damaged in transit.
And thank you for raising this issue for us.
nice info guys… but i wont be using this lot, theres some shocking stories in the ebay forums, & + 98p for a signature.. hmmm.. my advice is, forget only searching the internet for solutions (like everyone only does these days), and pick the phone up and personally call the couriers and ’strike’ a 1 on 1 deal.. we secured a £4 per consignment up to 10kg deal with DHL, and we only have to send 20 consignments a month, and they have been faultless. ive also found http://www.collectplus.co.uk which looks like another good option (not tried it though). all the best and good luck guys.
Russ, thanks for your comments. We actually covered Collect+ a couple of days ago
http://tamebay.com/2009/10/alternatives-to-royal-mail-collect.html
Maybe you need to search the internet a bit more
Well my first parcel sent using MyHermes has just been delivered OK (picked up on Thursday), so all seemed to go smoothly.
Thanks for the info Tamebay, and the discount info too
Gill – and others – would be great to hear how it goes when you’ve sent a few parcels via alternative services. If anyone would keep notes and send em over in a week or two for me to collate into a post, that would be super.
Gill, don’t mean to be negative but that seems very slow to me.
Out of interest what was the distance between your collection location and the delivery location? And was the package trackable throughout?
We’ve just done a deal with DHL through Sendex which is very attractive – not as low as MyHermes but next day for about a pound more which seems worth it to me.
Also a note by the way that all the Special Delivery packages we posted on Thurs and Fri last week (around 30) were delivered next day so that does also work as an alternative even on strike days.
It’s a 3 to 5 day service so Thursday to Tuesday is bang in the middle at 4 working days
I appreciate that but I don’t think any ebay buyer is going to give anyone a 4 or 5 for that speed of delivery and I would think it would affect DSR’s across the range because an unhappy buyer marks everything down. That would be my concern.
The reality is that the despatch time DSR is delivery time – we all know it and even ebay have admitted that by suspending it during the Royal Mail strikes. If it was despatch time they wouldn’t have had to would they?
In the long term it’s my concern too, however I’m working on ways to offer preimum services with options for slower delivery (for free). If a buyer choose to downgrade it sets the expectation and the service is miles better than RM Standard parcels (also 3-5 days) but untracked.
Andy – it wasn’t overly fast, but my customer knew how long it was going to take. Many of my customers are used to ordering from QVC / Ideal World who also use MyHermes, so most will be familiar with the service and probably wouldn’t opt for it it if their local courier wasn’t up to much.
I appreciate that different considerations (including speed) apply to ebay sales, but this was a website sale. I’m not selling on ebay atm and don’t plan to again before the postal disputes have been sorted out, whenever that might be.
My main concern was make sure an alternative choice was available for my customers, although as it turns out, so far I’ve only had one taker.
MyHermes was very easy to use and low cost, I didn’t actually try to track the delivery.
I did speak to a local franchise of a national courier (APC) recommended by a friend a few weeks ago – who didn’t want to touch me with a bargepole! The guy obviously thought I was very risky – not a ltd co (I thought that was quite ironic as surely easier to get money back from a sole trader), not VAT registered, working from home etc
I wasn’t even asking for credit and would have been perfectly happy to pay up front.
MyHermes is a good service. Reasonable price and collect from you. As a wheelchair bound guy this is helpful,saves queing at the post office. Re the 98p signature charge then you pass it on to the buyer surely,most of the time it will be signed for anyway,without charge.
Current discount code for 10% off chages daily on ebay so make sure you chck it if sending daily
I would NOT recommend MyHermes at all.
As a growing internet business I trialled them and had more customer complaints in 2 weeks than I’ve had in 18 months when using Royal Mail. My parcels got delivered quicker through the strikes by Royal mail than Hermes and even if they took 2 weeks they won’t let you claim!
Their staff give you wrong information, their couriers go on holiday and the cover doesn’t turn up and nobody checks so your parcels are just dumped until they come back and discover a backlog. They don’t send you claim forms when you ask, they don’t call you when you ask, they don’t reply to your letters of complaint and they will not give the name of the person in charge so you can write direct either.
They are a shambles.