Royal Mail Guide

Want to use EasyPost to ship with Royal Mail? This guide will break down all the necessary steps to make it happen.

This guide will help you use EasyPost to ship with Royal Mail. It will cover:

Getting onboarded with Royal Mail requires some extra verification steps for account security, which might make the onboarding process a little longer. Thankfully, there isn't too much information that the customer needs to provide.

Also, it's important to note that Royal Mail requires a designation support liaison in order to handle any Royal Mail support issues. Because of this, all Royal Mail support issues must go through EasyPost first, since we will be the designated support liaison between you and Royal Mail.

Before you get started with onboarding your Royal Mail account, we recommend generating a label through our API first to understand how the label generation will work. If you haven't generated your first shipping label with EasyPost, we recommend reading our Getting Started Guide to learn how.

Setting Up Your Royal Mail Account

EasyPost is an officially approved Royal Mail vendor. In order to begin the onboarding process for your Royal Mail account, first visit the Carrier Accounts page of your EasyPost account dashboard. Click the "Add Carrier" button at the top of the screen and choose "Royal Mail". You'll be asked to provide some information, which includes:

  • Reference: A custom reference used for your own documentation purposes.
  • Description: A description field used for your own documentation purposes.
  • Royal Mail Account Number: The account number associated with your Royal Mail account. If you do not have this information, contact your Royal Mail representative to receive it.
  • OBA Email Address: The email address associated with your Royal Mail account. This email needs to be registered with OBA for a successful onboarding. You can register your account/email for OBA at here.
  • Posting Location Number (PLN): 10 digit number beginning with 90. If you do not have this information, contact your Royal Mail representative to receive it.

After you save your Royal Mail account to your EasyPost dashboard, reach out to support@easypost.com and let us know you wish to move forward with the onboarding process. Providing EasyPost Support with the same information as you provided above (i.e. OBA email, PLN number, etc) will help speed up the process and help us find your account information sooner - we will need this information to continue onboarding. By the end of the onboarding process, the following services will have been loaded and available to use:

  • RoyalMail
  • InternationalSigned
  • InternationalTracked
  • InternationalTrackedAndSigned
  • SpecialDeliveryGuaranteed1pm
  • SpecialDeliveryGuaranteed9am

Enabling additional contracted Royal Mail services in EasyPost is a separate process that can only be done once onboarding has been completed. In order for us to enable the use of these contracted services, please provide us with the contract number associated with each of these services. They are usually four digits plus two letters that end in "TS" and "TN" (i.e XXXXTS, XXXXTN). You can request your contract numbers from business.customer.service@royalmail.com if you do not know them.

Receiving Accurate Rates

While Royal Mail does not offer real time rates, we do have generic rates that are returned for some of the default services onboarded. All other services will have a rate of $0.01 unless negotiated rates are provided via CSV formatted rate table.

If you have negotiated rates with Royal Mail, you'll need to contact your Royal Mail representative and have them send over your rate tables along with your account number (for verification purposes). Once we receive your rate tables and can confirm that they're associated with your specific account, we'll immediately upload them to your account so you can receive accurate Royal Mail rates on EasyPost.

Service
Transit Time
Max Dimensions (inches)
Max Weight (ounces)
InternationalPriority
InternationalEconomy
InternationalStandard
InternationalTrackedAndSigned
InternationalTracked
InternationalSigned
AccountMail
RoyalMailUnsigned
RoyalMail
SpecialDeliveryGuaranteed
SpecialDeliveryGuaranteed1pm
SpecialDeliveryGuaranteed9am
StandardLetter
Tracked24
Tracked24HighVolume
Tracked24HighVolumeSignature
Tracked24LBT
Tracked24SignatureLBT
Tracked48LBT
Tracked48SignatureLBT
Tracked24Signature
Tracked48
Tracked48HighVolume
Tracked48HighVolumeSignature
Tracked48Signature
TrackedReturns24
TrackedReturns48
CrossBorderImportTracked48HighVolume

Predefined Packages

Predefined Package
Dimensions (inches)
Weight (ounces)
LARGELETTER
NA
SMALLPARCEL
NA
MEDIUMPARCEL
NA
LETTER
NA
PRINTEDPAPER
NA

Generating Shipping Labels

Generating shipping labels for Royal Mail is exactly the same as generating them for any other carrier with EasyPost. See our Getting Started Guide for help generating your first shipping label.

EasyPost offers native Royal Mail labels in PNG and ZPL formats.

Manifests and Pickups

Manifesting is a strict requirement of Royal Mail - you must manifest your shipments before they can be picked up and processed. EasyPost will automatically manifest any unmanifested Royal Mail shipments at the end of every day to help fulfill this requirement. However, should you need to supply a pickup driver with the manifest, it is recommended to manifest your Royal Mail shipments manually with the EasyPost API so you can receive the document you need.

Manifesting is also asynchronous and can take several minutes to fully complete and receive a manifest document. Because of this, you will not immediately receive a driver manifest summary upon manifesting your batch of shipments, but it will become available after a few minutes. Here is some suggested work-flow to help with handling this asynchronous manifesting:

  • 1. Create a batch with a list of shipments (optionally add shipments to the batch throughout the day).
  • 2a. Wait X number of seconds (usually 1-3 seconds depending on batch size) for the batch creation job to finish

    OR

  • 2b. Wait for a batch.updated webhook event which will show that the batch.state is "created". (Note: attempting step 3 will result in errors if it is performed while the batch.state is still in "creating" status.)

  • 3. Manifest (scan_form) batch.
  • 4a. Wait X number of minutes (can take up to 5 minutes) and fetch the scan_form to confirm it is completed

    OR

  • 4b. Using webhooks, wait for the scan_form.updated event and obtain the URL to your manifest document at that time.

Tracking Your Royal Mail Packages

For more information on tracking with Royal Mail, please reach out to support@easypost.com.

Need More Info About Royal Mail?

Our Carrier Metadata endpoint can programatically return information about Royal Mail including service levels, predefined packages, supported features, and shipment options.

Use this information to quickly integrate with Royal Mail or make educated decisions about your carrier mix. You can also use the Carrier Metadata endpoint to retrieve information about all the carriers on the EasyPost platform.

Talk to a Shipping Expert

Any questions about how to start shipping with Royal Mail through the EasyPost API?