Sending importer details for international Royal Mail and Parcelforce orders

Royal Mail have introduced commercial export, which means they now need to know who is receiving your goods in the destination country. That party is called the importer.

StoreFeeder now sends importer details automatically whenever an order crosses a customs border on a Royal Mail or Parcelforce service. For most orders you do not need to do anything. If you send business-to-business orders to the EU, there is one field you will need to fill in.

Which orders this affects

Importer details are sent on orders that leave the country your warehouse is in and are despatched on a Royal Mail or Parcelforce service. Commercial export applies in particular to:

• Royal Mail High Value Despatch (HVD)
• Parcelforce Delivered Taxes Paid services – ERA, ER1 and ER2

Your UK domestic orders are not affected at all, and neither are your other couriers. Nothing changes on your labels, CN paperwork, or manifests.

Please note: orders to Jersey, Guernsey and Northern Ireland do count as crossing a customs border, even though they are treated as domestic for pricing. You will see importer details being sent on these orders.

What StoreFeeder sends for you

StoreFeeder uses the person or company you are delivering to as the importer, which is what Royal Mail expect. The importer name, address, postcode, country, phone number and email address are all taken from the delivery address on the order, so as long as that address is complete there is nothing for you to do.

StoreFeeder does not pass on placeholder contact details. If the delivery phone number or the email address on the order is "n/a", "n a", "n\a" or a single dash, it is treated as blank and left out, because a carrier will reject a placeholder as an invalid phone number or address.

Royal Mail need at least one way of contacting the importer, so every commercial export order needs either a real phone number or a real email address. If both are placeholders, the order will not despatch.

Business-to-business orders to the EU need a recipient EORI

This is the one thing you may need to act on. If an order is marked as a business order and is going to the EU on a commercial export service, Royal Mail require the recipient's EORI number. Without it, the order will not despatch.

You can enter it against the order, or against the customer so that it is filled in for you every time.

Adding it to a single order

1. Open the order and go to the Customs Information section of the Edit Order page.
2. Enter the number in Recipient EORI.
3. Save the order and despatch as normal.

The three recipient customs fields

These fields appear on the Edit Order page for any order going outside Great Britain. Previously they only appeared on international DPD, Interlink and DHL orders, so if you ship with Royal Mail or Parcelforce you will be seeing them for the first time.

Once an order has been despatched

After an order has been despatched or manifested, these fields stay on the page so that you can always see what was declared to the carrier, but they can no longer be edited. This is because the details have already been sent, so changing them in StoreFeeder would not reach the carrier.

Messages you might see when despatching

If the carrier rejects an order, StoreFeeder now tells you exactly what is missing instead of showing a general error. The most common ones are below.