Processing Royal Mail Direct Orders

The process of despatching orders that have shipping methods associated with the Royal Mail Direct Integration is very similar to despatching orders with current shipping methods in StoreFeeder. However, there are some points to be aware of. Firstly, all Royal Mail shipments will go through validation even if you have this turned off on your account.  Unfortunately we are unable to despatch any order without the correct information, and this process is the quickest and easiest way to do so.  The information we need to despatch an order with Royal Mail is as follows:

• Order Weight - this is needed to validate the packaging size and service you are using, and to make sure we send the correct information over to Royal Mail.
• Shipping Address 1 - This is used to ensure the parcel reaches its intended recipient.
• Shipping Postcode - Required for the exact same reason as above.
• Packaging Size - This is required to validate the service, we need this to produce the label and eventually send over to Royal Mail.

If the order already has all of this information, it will be marked as despatched and any orders going via a tracked service will be assigned tracking numbers. If the order is missing one or more of the above pieces of data, then you will be prompted to enter the missing information and re-try the despatch.

Please note you must go through the validation process to print off a label for Royal Mail, if the process is skipped or the order is manually changed then you will only receive a blank label containing the issue you need to solve.

Once all of the information has been saved against the order(s), the system will move to the second stage of despatch and obtain any required tracking numbers and mark the order as despatched. You can potentially see orders fail to despatch here as well, if the weight, country or packaging size on the order are not within the accepted bounds for the service on the order. These issue can be fixed through a variety of methods, and problems such as incorrect weight can be amended directly on the edit orders page.  If the country, weight and packaging size are correct then you will need to change the service the order is being sent on.

Once the order has passed through the two stages of validation, we will mark is as despatched and assign the tracking number if needed.

We automatically assign tracking ranges for the majority of services and as soon as you run out we will assign more, however if you're using an LBT service you will need to add these in manually. For the full process your account manager can help. If you have run out of tracking ranges you will receive an error stating StoreFeeder was unable to auto assign a range.

Once an order has been despatched through this process you will receive an invoice and label to enable you to send the parcel.