"Postmaster" P&P Quote Generator for UK Mainland-Despatched Courier Rates

Developer No Mystery, Inc.
License Commercial
Compatibility CubeCart v6 CubeCart v5 CubeCart v4 CubeCart v3
Date Added 21st Sep 2021, 20:47
Last Updated 5th Oct 2021, 03:11

£9.99

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  • Postmaster20210910.zip
Description
Documentation

Ready-made postage policies, allowing you to add extra costs to account for packaging and labour costs!
Using delivery quotes for between 2 grammes and 80kg (domestic) / 60kg (worldwide) - yes, the quotes have already been researched for you!
Save around 12 weeks / hundreds of hours of hard work, and a whole lot of money!
Generate your own comprehensive postage policies within about a minute or two!
It does not get better than this.
 

In .ods file format (natively used by Apache OpenOffice Calc and LibreOffice Calc, both free spreadsheet programs available for Windows, Linux and Mac, but may be compatible with other spreadsheets too).

 
High shipping rates are the Number 1 reason for cart abandonment in online shopping. The Postmaster spreadsheet will generate highly competitive postage and pack[ag]ing (P&P) quotes for you to directly display to your customers around the world. The courier costs themselves are pre-filled, selected for the most competitive quotes from among a spread of the best couriers. As such, this spreadsheet is truly plug and play. Just input a handful of variables (e.g. packaging cost, labour cost, insurance premium, marketplace fee for your product category, payment processing fee, etc.) and read off the resulting P&P quotes.  
 
The Postmaster spreadsheet is only for beginners and intermediate users, i.e. those whose products are a wide range of weights, and so they are never sure how heavy their next shipment will be - they need quotes for all weights and geographical locations at their fingertips from the get-go. There is an outside chance that the Postmaster spreadsheet may be of use to professional high-volume sellers, if they can sort their orders into weights and zones, and there are enough in each grouping to merit this sorting, and enogh to fulfil quotas required to qualify for a business account with the relevant couriers. If so, then the high-volume seller might be able to use business accounts with an array of couriers, routing groups of orders through that array of couriers (the array indicated by the Postmaster spreadsheet), thus getting the best prices right across the board, rather than investing too heavily in one courier.
 
 
 
GIVING YOU THE ADVANTAGE:  
 
This spreadsheet is a highly versatile system offering a wealth of features. For example, it allows sellers running their own online shop via cart software, OR using a third party online marketplace with business (e.g. under eBay Managed Payments) AND private (e.g. under eBay private seller rates) accounts to:
 
- Generate end-user P&P quotes for the entire world, for 10 weight categories but ALSO for a set of pre-defined amalgamated type-weight categories as one would have for postage policies on eBay e.g. Large Letter under 500g, Small Parcel under 500g - all this is AUTO-GENERATED once the user has input a handful of variables (it takes 1 or 2 minutes to input the variables)
- Offer the best P&P prices to customers, from the best couriers. The Postmaster spreadsheet is cheaper than a shipping plugin that you just install with a click, because it doesn't tie you to the weird and wonderful prices that the shipping plugin would force you into. The Postmaster spreadsheet is predicated on giving you the best courier deals of the lot, for each version of the spreadsheet, rather than leaving you at the mercy of one source of quotes e.g. one courier's quotes, which often become plain hilarious for higher weights. Remember: high shipping rates are the Number 1 reason for cart abandonment in online shopping.  
- Offer comprehensive well tailored quotes to customers around the world, spanning 28  - yes, 28 - regions / zones including a few specific countries
- Give P&P quotes for just about any online marketpace imaginable
- Make some services free of charge - or reduce their cost by an amount in step with other services being completely free - thus making a seller's shipping policy more egalitarian, more coherent
- Include packaging and labour costs for deliveries weighing between 2 grammes and 80 kilogrammes (UK and isles, or 60 kilogrammes rest of world) - because there's a world of difference between packaging a 90g large letter and an 80kg pallet
- Include an insurance premium and so create an echelon of P&P readouts for high-value items
- Allow for tiered online marketplace fees - e.g. where below a £400 transaction amount, the fee rate might be 6.9% for a particular category, but above £400, the fee rate may drop to 3%
- Allow you to account for eBay's Premium Service / Top Rated Plus discount
- Quote sans VAT and VAT-inclusive
- Globally increase postage costs by a percentage and / or a lump sum - great for ad hoc tweaks (this may even allow the seller to emulate a general courier price increase, without purchasing updates of this spreadsheet!)
- Round P&P quotes to the nearest specified multiple e.g. if multiple is specified as £0.25, the spreadsheet will give finalised P&P quotes ending £xx.00, £xx.25, £xx.50, £xx.75 (in this example)
 
 
 
Many of the P&P quotes will be for collection services, so you may be able to trade from very isolated parts of the country / in all weather / in sickness and in health! If you prefer to drop your parcels off at a courier's drop-off location (e.g. a supermarket designated by the courier), the cost will usually be a little lower than arranging a collection. The selected tariffs often assume that you will drop off items up to 10kg at your courier's drop-off location, with items above 10kg collected by the courier. It does help to be near a post office, a Hermes parcelshop, and a UPS Access Point, but the Postmaster spreadsheet gives a lot of flexibility nonetheless by giving many quotes as collection services.
 
This spreadsheet will save you around 12 weeks' / a few hundred hours' work (yes, really) (basically, a quarter of the year, if you organise your time well). More than that: it will actually save you about half a year of dithering, and weeks of being chained to your desk, and all the stress of feeling your free time slip away. I'm not joking at all. The time and effort taken to create this spreadsheet would ruin the average person. You get all that hard work work for a miniscule fee.  
 
This spreadsheet will very likely give you vast savings over just muddling through with a couple of service providers. It will quite likely easily pay for itself after a few days - let alone the enormous saving of time and effort.
 
Please try to do the work yourself first, to help you appreciate the enormous undertaking this actually is, and thus spread the word!
 
 
 
TARIFFS:
 
The tariffs / services catered for are:
 
UK & ISLES:
- Royal Mail Large Letter 2nd Class Standard
- Royal Mail Large Letter 2nd Class Signed-For
- Royal Mail 2nd Class Signed-For Small Parcel
- Royal Mail 1st Class Signed-For Small Parcel
- Royal Mail Special Delivery 1pm
- Economy up to 80kg
- Economy Oversized up to 20kg
- Express up to 80kg
- Half Pallet up to 80kg
- Digial Delivery
- Cash on Delivery
- Cash on Collection
 
WORLDWIDE:
- Royal Mail Large Letter International Standard
- Royal Mail Large Letter International Tracked +/ Signed
- Royal Mail International Standard Small Parcel
- Royal Mail International Tracked +/ Signed Small Parcel
- Economy up to 60kg
- Economy Oversized up to 20kg
- Express up to 60kg
- Digial Delivery
 
 
 
WIDE COMPATIBILITY:
 
The spreadsheet was created in LibreOffice, in the .ods format. It is designed to be read with LibreOffice or OpenOffice, which are free office productivity suites - specifically the "Calc" spreadsheet program in each of these.  
 
You can download the programs for free via the links given on their Wikipedia pages.
 
 
As you can see, LibreOffice is available on the following operating systems:
Linux, Windows 7+, macOS 10.10+; Android, iOS
It is also unofficially supported by: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Haiku, Solaris (v. 5.2.5) [as such, l believe LibreOffice is also available for OpenIndiana]


The .ods file format may be compatible with other programs too - consult Google.
 
 
 
UPDATES:  
 
It is envisaged that this spreadsheet will be regularly updated, between 2 - 4 times yearly, but in my own experience the quotes have been usable for years. In fact, you may update the spreadsheet yourself.
 
To save yourself tens of hours of work just to update your data, regularly purchase updated versions of the spreadsheet from us instead.
 
Or ... as an alternative to an exhaustive update, the Postmaster spreadsheet allows you to globally increase postage costs by a percentage and / or a lump sum, which may allow you to very approximately emulate a general courier price increase, without purchasing an update of this spreadsheet!

 

 

RETURN / REFUND POLICY:
 
Enjoy your purchase. If there is a fault with your software, please contact us at [remove the GAPs!]:

United Kingdom 0330GAP175GAP7090 or speakGAPatReasonGAP.works  . If the fault cannot be rectified, we will give you a full refund, to your original payment method, within 2 business days.
 
If the fault can be rectified, we will instead issue you with an updated version of your software, patched for the error.

Some brief documentation follows, but full documentation is given with the purchased package:

 

NOTES:
 
- The Postmaster spreadsheet is intended ONLY for users in the United Kingdom (quotes are for despatch from mainland UK), although it could probably be altered for use in any nation
 
- The Postmaster spreadsheet is not an advanced tool because it doesn't automatically generate printable shipping labels by plugging in to your online shop / marketplace, as a shipping plugin might. Nor does it in a similar vein log sales data for you.
 
- The quotes given are all subject to change, especially quotes from courier comparison sites. However, they still offer a usable array of data upon which you may base your postage policies.
 
- MAKE SURE to check Parcel2Go and Interparcel for any last minute deals, they can pop up out of nowhere, as much as half the price of what the cost of carriage ought to be. They are unpredictable, sorry.
 
- There may be an emphasis on drop-off tariffs (where the parcel is dropped off at a designated shop for collection by the courier) for parcels under 10kg destined for the UK, because it is envisaged that trade will be lower level if restricted to the UK only, and even if not, competition in intra-UK trade will be more intense than competition for international sales, hence the greater need quote prices as low as possible for postage within the UK, even if it means having to drop off parcels at designated shops for the courier to collect from.
 
- In the marginalia for the courier quotes, wherever "days" are mentioned, business days / working days are meant.
 
- All raw courier quotes (before you have padded them out with marketplace fees etc.) will be non-account, for the public - the prices any member of the public can verify. An unexpected bonus there is that the seller doesn't necessarily need to show lower prices if they ever get a direct account with a courier. It is ethically sound to still display the prices available to the public (as this spreadsheet displays), to the public. Also, even if you find a cheaper courier, you can still at least use these rates as the standard / a fallback (bearing in mind that cheaper deals aren't always worth it, as you may find out).
 
- For UK delivery quotes via Parcel2Go, there will be an option not to insure the contents at all. However, in line with all other sources, you'll receive the version of the Parcel2Go UK delivery quote that includes the basic level of insurance. Because so many things are excluded by various couriers' insurance policies, you may prefer to send uninsured where possible.
 
- Customs charges may still apply. You may wish to inform your customers that your quoted P&P costs exclude customs clearance fees.
 
- There will always be variations within a geographical zone. Some of these variations can be very large, way in excess of the figures stated, even if for lower weight bands they are way *lower*. To help cushion the impact of this occasional variability, rather than force the customer to pay extra money, the seller could add an amount of money to the P&P charge, as "padding", via this spreadsheet (by increasing the quote by a percentage and / or a lump sum).
 
- With the exception of Sicily and obvious (because they are large) nations such as Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, and well-known island states, islands are not usually covered- see the Postmaster Zones.txt file for a full categorisation of the world's countries into the zones used in the Postmaster spreadsheet
 
- Currently, Africa is excluded, due to there being very low demand to post there, coupled with high risk. Africa can be retrofitted up to 2kg by just coping Asia prices for Royal Mail tariffs.
 
- The Postmaster spreadsheet caters for shipment weights of up to 80kg in the UK & isles, and up to 60kg for the rest of the world
 
- A pallet delivery service is included, but only for the UK and Channel Isles, because it is envisaged that sellers dealing with pallets would tend to really only deal in pallets, and thus this spreadsheet would be overkill for their narrow requirements, but it would be fine for a seller that is starting out with pallets or is selling a wide variety of items, some of which may need to be palletised
 
- The only timed delivery service included is Royal Mail Special Delivery 1pm within the UK

Ref: 437/495