I would like to ask how does it work when I need to ship a few hundreds of small letters (envelopes) to UK recipients. I will be visiting the UK and I would like to bring these letters with me in my luggage. This way, my UK customers will receive their mail faster.
Do I just come to the post office and hand all the letters over to them? Will they take them without any additional paperworks or me needing to have an account with Royal Mail?
I would like to send them as 1st Class, untracked letters.
The quickest way is to just purchase sheets of 1st class stamps from the post office when you get there, no account needed. They are self-adhesive. Stick them on the letters and hand them over the counter or post them in a letterbox.
As long as they are classed as letters, ie maximum size 240x165mm and 5mm thick, the price is ÂŁ1.65 each, no discounts for buying in bulk. If thicker than 5mm, then up to 25mm they are large letters, ÂŁ2.60 each.
Thank you for your response. This is exactly what I did the last time when I was in the UK. However, none of the letters were received by the customers.
I believe that I used the wrong rates. Personally, I would rather have a staff member assist me.
Do you think that they would turn me away if I came there with 200 letters at once?
They are definitely thicker than 5mm. So, they would be large letters.
Hey Kika. Yes that would be your best bet, turn up at a post office and show them what you have. Depending on how busy they are (choose a post office not on a busy high street!) they will advise but they certainly look like 1st or 2nd class large. If you get really lucky and they’re really friendly / bored they might even offer to apply the stamps for you which my local office used to do until their over officious boss stopped it.
Most post offices, especially in cities, are short staffed and asking them for help to stick 200 stamps on your envelopes is a bit cheeky.
Just buy your stamps, take them back to your hotel or go to a coffee shop and stick them on. It won’t take you too long.
Then either pop them into a post box (or maybe more than one) or just give them to the post office staff. You won’t get a receipt or proof of postage.
We have stamps but also, the staff can print a franked sticker but I think they are mostly used for parcels when the address is typed into their system. Probably more for tracked or semi-tracked services.
No, not at all, it makes no difference whether there is any sort of address or no address at all.
Okay. So, even though the envelope has the sender’s address (which is a non-UK location), they will still accept them and I don’t need to register these large letters in any way other than taking them to the counter?
Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea how stamps work. Here, the post office staff member has to weigh every letter and then run it through the franking machine.
If you apply an incorrect stamp, I am assuming the postal service would then reject the envelope, even if they find it in their mailbox.
In Slovakia, there are no mailboxes and literally, every envelope has to be weighed by a postal worker first. I have only ever seen stamps being used when someone took 1 postcard or 1 envelope and used them for aesthetic purpose.
Yes, just take them to the post office or put them in a mailbox, The return address is irrelevant but clearly, it won’t get returned to you if it can’t be delivered for whatever reason. Stamps are untracked so the post office staff don’t do anything with them unless you want proof of postage.
A stamp is just a sticker that states you have paid a certain amount and if it correct for the size/weight of the item, it will be sent to the recipient.
If it’s the wrong amount and this gets detected (it may not), the recipient may be asked to pay the difference and some extra as admin fee.
Or it might get stuck/lost, never to be seen again.
So, I already managed to ship all the hundreds of envelopes. When visiting the post office, they had a cut-out wooden board showing the differences between a regular letter and large letter. Although my letters would fit through the hole for a small letter, I accepted that they would be large, as the postal worker told me.
He gave us green stamps showing 2, as for second class large letter. They were valued just under ÂŁ2 per envelope. Then, we had to stick them on the letters.
