Royal Mail’s New Parcel Postbox Only Opens For A Label It Can Read

Royal Mail has been putting a new kind of pillar box into town centres and new housing estates since the spring, around 600 of them over 6 months, beginning in Belfast and moving on through Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow and Tyneside. Each one carries a solar panel on its lid, which on a British street is an act of real optimism, and underneath the letter slot sits a drawer big enough for a medium sized parcel. The drawer has no handle. It opens only when the scanner on the front can read the barcode on the parcel’s label.

How The New Parcel Postbox Works

The sender prints a prepaid label, either a return label from a shop or postage bought through Click & Drop, sticks it on the parcel and holds the barcode up to the scanner. If the code reads, the drawer drops open, the parcel goes in, and proof of posting can be requested in the Royal Mail app afterwards. The new boxes take parcels up to 24cm high, 48cm long and 43cm wide, which is a good deal more than the shoebox the older upgraded boxes were built around.

Jack Clarkson, the managing director of out of home at Royal Mail, said when the first upgraded boxes went in that “if you have a Royal Mail label on your parcel, and it fits”, the postbox would do the rest. Vinted sellers need to read that with one exception in mind. Vinted’s own help pages tell sellers using its Royal Mail labels not to drop them in postboxes at all, because the parcel would not be registered as collected, there would be no tracking to prove it had been sent, and Vinted says such a parcel will not be delivered or compensated.

A Vinted parcel carrying a Royal Mail label still has to be handed in at a Post Office, a Royal Mail shop, a locker or a Collect+ shop.

What Stops A Label Scanning

The scanner on the box behaves much like the ticket barrier at a railway station, where a creased ticket gets pushed back out while the queue builds behind, and it takes about as much interest in the explanation as the barrier does. Most failed reads come down to how the label was printed and where it was stuck.

If the scanner cannot read the label, the drawer stays shut and the parcel goes home with you.

• The label wants the largest flat face of the parcel, clear of seams, tape and the edges of the box.
• Stretched over the lumpy side of a padded bag, it creases through the barcode, and one crease can be enough.
• Shiny clear tape laid across the code can bounce the scanner’s light back at it, so tape is safer kept to the edges of the label.
• Grey, streaky bars from a home printer running low on ink read badly.
• Stick it on square rather than at an angle.

Paper Labels Or A Thermal Roll

Most people clearing out a wardrobe print on plain paper and fix it on with Sellotape, and for a few parcels a month that works well enough, provided the ink is dark and the tape stays off the barcode. Once the parcels become regular, a small thermal printer starts to earn its place, since it needs no ink and prints the standard 4×6 inch label in one pass. Royal Mail used to hand those rolls to business customers for free, but it has been charging about £4.69 a roll before VAT since January, so a seller pays for the roll either way and can buy Royal Mail labels from whichever supplier prices them best.

Paper sheets suit someone who posts now and then, whereas a seller sending parcels most days usually finds that proper e-commerce shipping labels on a roll save the cutting, the taping and the smudged ink. Direct thermal labels are printed on heat sensitive paper, which is why they need no ink, and it is also why they fade or darken in strong sunlight and heat. A parcel delivered within a couple of days will hardly notice. A stack of printed labels left on a sunny windowsill for a fortnight might, and some acrylic packing tapes have been found to speed the fading up.

Before printing anything, measure the sealed parcel against the box’s limits, because a parcel that scans but will not fit the drawer is going to the Post Office anyway, and once it is in, ask the app for proof of posting before walking off.