What We Do?
With ever increasing postal charges looming all around the Globe, it looks like shoppers will have no choice but to only shop locally and buying internationally will become something only possible for the big fish. Or does it…
The Post Lady offers international shoppers a safe UK mailing and holding address, suitable for all UK purchases from online retailers, eBay and social media pages.
It can often be expensive to have individual purchases sent internationally. Especially if you want to make multiple small purchases, from various retailers or online sellers the UK. The cost of sending several small parcels internationally can soon mount up, making postage alone pretty expensive.
The Post Lady offers a secure UK address, where you can have your purchases sent. You can then continue to add purchases to your own personal basket, until you are ready to have them all sent to you in one go.
Shopping made easy!
FAQ'S
Each time The Post Lady takes a parcel for you, it is weighed to provide you with a combined shipping weight of all of your purchases, meaning you can easily keep track of any parcels coming into the facility. We can receive anything up to 20kg!
We will then arrange the postage of your entire bundle of purchases to you direct, or to a secure location such as parcel lockers (size restrictions may apply), whenever you are ready to send.
This is particularly beneficial where a business offers free postage or all inclusive to a UK address or where a company is happy to post internationally, but wants a flat fee, regardless of the size of your purchase. Some UK online retailers are not able to offer international postage due to their insurance restrictions, or will only post to countries within the EU.
Unlike other mail box providers who simply redirect individual parcels, The Post Lady offers a safe holding location for all of your purchases. Not only does this significantly reduce your international postage costs, but it also means you are doing your part to reduce your own air carbon footprint.
We also don’t expect you to ship within 30 days! With The Post Lady, you can buy now and ship in 6 months time if you want to.
Some other mailboxes will require you to guess how much post you will receive during your contracted period, or charge high handling fees per parcel, or ask for over £100 for a set period. We don’t think any of these are helpful when you want to keep cost low. After all, the more you save on mailboxes and postage, the more you can spend on your purchases!
As an example, an individual package of 600g to USA via royal mail international standard is £11.65*.
If that same customer made 2 more purchases weighing 600g in the same month this would cost them £34.95* on postage in that one month.
However 1800g to USA international standard £18.30*
A saving of £16.65* per month or nearly £200* per year if regularly purchasing a similar amount per month.
On a smaller scale, at £5.00* each time for 7 large letter sized parcels of say 220g can also quickly add up to over the price of a small parcel as noted above (around £35.00*). If sent all together, 1540g would cost £17.50*. A saving of £17.50* or over £200* per year if regularly purchasing a similar amount per month.
(*Prices correct at time of print)
Each user is given a unique reference number to identify them here in the post room and a UK address where mail can be accepted at any time of the day by Royal Mail or by courier. This will be given to you once you have registered.
When using eBay or checking out on a webshop, you simply save your name followed by your unique reference number and The Post Lady address. When using Ebay you can add this to your saved addresses, so that any purchases paid for by paypal are covered by paypals buyer guarantee.
Some websites give you the option to add both home address and postal address if this is different to your home address.
After making your purchase you can log in to your personal account to check it has arrived safely. Although, we will email you as soon as it arrives. There is no need to let us know its coming. As long as your are registered and hold a unique reference number, we will accept your post.
Every time a parcel is accepted for you, we will weigh it and add it to any previous parcels received to give you a running total of your parcels weight. This will alert you that a parcel you have had sent, has been received.
The annual fee is just £29.95 and includes:
A UK Mailing address.
A unique reference name/number. This is specific to you and you only.
Access to a personalised area of our website for which you will require a login username and password. Here you can access all your personal information, an area for all your deliveries and full management of your forward shipping options.
Insurance for your belongings whilst they are in the care of The Post Lady.
We also have a Post Lady Business Account for customers who wish to buy and sell their UK finds.
Yes we do. This is known as a Mini Membership.
For just £5 you can sign up as a mini member of The Post Lady. You will receive all of the benefits of a Post Lady account including a secure UK mailing address which is open and available to accept parcels for you 5 days per week, access to an easy to navigate account, free consolidations and no fees to receive or ship out parcels, for 1 month recurring. Usual Post Lady terms and conditions apply.
If you choose to sign up for a full premium account after this period, we will refund your original £5 mini membership payment.
Premium Post Lady members enjoy all of the above for just £29.95 per year. That’s just under £2.50 per month. Becoming a Premium Post Lady member gives you greater flexibility with storage times. Buy now, ship later.
As many times as you like. 4 times per year or 40, its completely up to you and the same price regardless of the number of shipments you make. We do ask that your basket is completely empty, at least 3 days before the end of your contract term.
In short, it’s a simple adding tool which takes the weights and dimensions of every parcel you have requested to ship and adds them all together. It then uses this information to search a small number of shippers to gather an estimated quote.
There are many personal touches though, which need to happen to reach the perfect bespoke consolidation, from removing outer packaging boxes, to using Tetris-like packing skills to fit it all in.
The tool isn’t smart enough to guess that we will be squishing the air out of packages when we consolidate them all into 1 box. It also isn’t smart enough to guess that we will split large heavy consolidation shipments into 2 boxes, to avoid overlarge heavy parcel charges.
So for this reason, the tool provides and ESTIMATED QUOTE only.
In reality, when you hit that button to let us know you are ready to ship, we are going to take your bundle of parcels and do everything in our power to consolidate your packages so that you get the best prices available.
We always provide every customer with a follow up manual quote, and never provide our customers with a generic price per box or weight. These live manual quotes are always a lot better than the estimated quotes.
We’ve done our homework and we are pretty sure that we have the lowest onward shipping prices of any UK mail forwarders!
We always suggest that you have items sent to us using trackable methods where possible. These are the new Royal Mail ‘tracked’ options or by courier, or for piece of mind, Royal Mail ‘recorded’ options require a signature when they get to the post room.
Standard Royal Mail parcels carry some degree of tracking now, and are scanned by the Royal mail post person when they reach our post room. Always ask the person sending your mail to retain a proof of posting.
We have so far, never had a parcel go missing en route to us, however if this should happen, we can point you in the right direction.
As long as no post or parcels have been received for you, a cancellation and refund can be requested within the first 14 days of registration of membership. This means the first time you register your information with The Post Lady, by completing the registration form through to payment. We call this the cooling-off period, and can be requested by heading to your account and selecting cancel membership. In the free text box, advise that you wish to invoke the cooling off guarantee. Your refund will be processed within 30 days. PayPal DO NOT refund the fees they took when processing your payment. We are therefore, unable to return the PayPal fee.
Refunds will not be processed for accounts of memberships over 14 days old.
If you wish to cancel your Post Lady account membership after this time, please follow the instructions under the heading ‘Cancellation Of Your Account’ which can be found on our terms and conditions page
Yes, within reason!
We can only send items which do not feature in our Prohibited Items section on the Postage Advice page.
It must also fall within certain size catagories and weigh no more than 20kg combined. Remember that you need to pay onward shipping costs. Something to consider before clicking ‘confirm’ on those surfboards. Your parcels must also not contain anything which would be deemed illegal in either our country or yours.
Although we do not open your packages, we reserve the right to, if we believe that your parcel may be in breech of our terms and conditions.
Not only is The Post Lady financially beneficial to shoppers, but it is easier and more simple for small businesses or sellers, who are unable or feel uncomfortable selling to customers outside the UK.
Even if your business offers international post, a customer may be reluctant to pay high postage costs to have a small item sent internationally from the UK. They may however, be happy to purchase if they can take advantage of your ‘FREE POSTAGE WITHIN THE UK’ option or only pay local rate postage to have it sent to The Post Lady. We understand that as a small business, every sale is important and we are proud to support many small businesses across the UK. The online retailers that we work with are delighted that we have provided them with a solution, and through us, have been able to open their doors to international buyers. Just check out our testimonials. Drop us a message through this Contact Us link or on Facebook to ask how we can support your small business.
No. It is important that you only use your Post Lady address as a postal address and not a home address. Your Post Lady address may not be used to register vehicles or for the electoral role. Stating that your Post Lady address is your residence will be deemed as fraud and could result in your account being cancelled.
Our office hours are 09:00 – 17:00 Monday to Friday. We are closed on Saturday and Sunday for deliveries but available for enquiries on Saturday morning.
The office deals with deliveries, uploads to accounts, general admin duties, correspondence, manual quotes, account approvals, communications and booking of shipments during office opening hours only. This is not an exhaustive list.
Our warehouse hours are 10:00 – 16:00 Monday to Friday. The warehouse is closed at the weekend.
Consolidations, contents checks, photographs and special requests are dealt with by the warehouse during warehouse opening hours only. This is not an exhaustive list.
If you need to know what time it is in the UK, we have a handy local clock at the bottom of the screen.
You may use your Post Lady address to purchase privately from your personal Social Media groups, or platforms such as eBay, or other websites and retailers and for all correspondence if necessary, for your own personal use, or for the benefit of your very close friends and family. This means that you, the account holder, may personally purchase items and have them shipped to your Post Lady address. The items you purchase or have shipped to your Post Lady address, must be for the benefit of your own household or for the benefit of your close friends and immediate family.
You may not give your Post Lady username, address or log-in details to any other person (including close friends and family). You may not allow them to make their own purchases and have them shipped to The Post Lady. Only the account holder may purchase items or have items shipped to their Post Lady address.
The workload for customers who do conduct their account for the above use, is significantly heavier than customers who use their Post Lady accounts for its intended functions of being a personal account. Customers found to be in breach of these terms and conditions will be contacted and asked to switch to a Post Lady Business account.
We recommend any friends and family set up their own personal Post Lady accounts. Each Post Lady customer will then have their own log in, where they can keep track of any deliveries which have arrived.
We do however, permit consolidating of shipments with other Post Lady customers at the express permission of any participating customer. Terms and conditions apply.
Receiving of post and parcels, consolidating and shipping out are all completely free for registered members at The Post Lady!!
Additional charges are as follows:
Onward shipping insurance for parcels over £50 – Varies
Your shipping charges – Varies
Packaging charges are provided below:
Customers own packaging: NO CHARGE. We will not charge you any extra for tape or labels.
Polymailers: 50p
Small parcel boxes (covering shipments up to and including 2kg in weight including the box): £1
Medium parcel boxes (covering shipments up to and including 5kg in weight including the box): £1.50
Large shipping boxes (covering up to and including 20kg in weight including the box): £2
Extra large shipping boxes (covering up to and including 30kg in weight including the box) £3
Special requests £5
Open packages, remove invoices and tags at consolidation stage £5 per shipment
Over storage limit £5 per week
Extra Care Wrapping £2 per consolidation
Opening parcels for contents checks (includes 1 picture) £2 per package
Additional pictures £1 per picture
Reconsolidate/Requote £5
Penalty fee for non-registered persons named on a parcel with registered username present £3
Lost Property Match £3
Collect from nearby property (addressed correctly) FREE
Collect from nearby property (incorrectly addressed) £3
Ship with another Post Lady Customer £5 fee for the customer not receiving the shipment
Express consolidations £5
Change your shipping address FREE
Change your shipping address after requesting a shipping quote £5
Shop For Me Assisted Purchase and Group Orders – 5% service charge will apply to each individual or participant of a group order and will be capped at £5 plus postage and PayPal related fees.
It is free to use our German shipping address if you need an EU address. It is a facility available for all Post Lady customers to use free of charge.
Parcels received in Germany are shipped to your UK storage every week, in a group shipment with other Post Lady customers. This way you benefit from cheap group shipping, rather than paying to ship individual items to your own country or to the UK.
The shipping fee is currently £4 per parcel (up to 2kg) which may be subject to change depending on shipping annual increases and any emergency situations. This fee will be payable when your parcel arrives in the UK which must be paid before we upload it to your Post Lady account. Terms and conditions apply.