Part 3: Shipping orders with Royal Mail and Zenstores

When your Royal Mail integration is ready you’ll be able to print labels and dispatch your orders using your normal Royal Mail services, in bulk.

Ensuring your printer settings are correct

Follow the recommended printer settings to ensure that your 2D barcode labels are correctly scanned.

Before printing ‘live’ shipments, please print this test label [https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/zenstoresmedia/rmz_test_labels/rm-test-label-6-4.pdf] and check that:

• The 2D barcode is clear
  
• The Royal Mail cruciform (logo) is clear
  
• The address is clear and readable.
  

To find out more about printer settings go here.

How to create Royal Mail shipping labels

1. Select all the orders that you want to ship with the same service using the checkboxes to the left. Click ‘Create shipments’.
   
2. In the pop up, select Royal Mail.
   
3. In the next window you can select the service that you want to use. Zenstores will automatically detect whether your orders are domestic or international and give you the relevant services to choose from.
   
4. Fill in the weight of your shipment.
   
5. Click ‘Book shipments’.
   
6. On the next window you can click ‘Print labels’ and they’ll open in a separate tab, ready to print.
   
7. When you click back to the Zenstores tab, you will be able to print any invoices, packing slips or job sheets that you require. Then you can click ‘Mark orders as dispatched’.
   

When you mark an order as dispatched this will automatically update the order on your sales channel, and upload any tracking details.

Delivery confirmation is available for Royal Mail 24 and 48 small parcels and larger. Find out more about delivery confirmation here. 

Manifesting Royal Mail shipments created in Zenstores

You have to manifest your Royal Mail shipments every day, if you don’t shipments may not be updated in your Royal Mail account, you maybe charged incorrectly or unexpectedly by Royal Mail, tracked post may not be scanned correctly, or shipments may not be booked out properly.

You can manifest your Royal Mail shipments daily from within Zenstores:

1. Click on the ‘Royal Mail End of day’ button in your Zenstores dashboard.
   
2. Set your manifest date and time.
   
3. Click the ‘Create manifest’ button
   
4. Print off your daily summary to hand to your Royal Mail delivery driver.
   

Cancelling shipments

If you need to cancel any of your shipments, you need to do this before you manifest in Zenstores. Any shipments that you want to cancel after you’ve manifested in Zenstores will need to be cancelled by logging into your Royal Mail account.

Hiding and favouriting Royal Mail services in Zenstores

You may have a number of services available on your Royal Mail account that you rarely use, therefore you can hide these so that you only see the services you use every day.

1. Hover over ‘Settings’ in your Zenstores dashboard
   
2. Select ‘Shipping’ then go to “Your Couriers” section
   
3. Click ‘Settings’ and select the Royal Mail integration
   
4. You’ll be taken to a shipping settings page for Royal Mail. Here you can select your most used services and hide unused services by checking or unchecking the box next to each service.
   

Shipping international orders with Royal Mail through Zenstores

Shipping international orders with Royal Mail is fully supported through Zenstores. When you’re shipping an order, Zenstores will only ever show you the services that are available for that order’s destination.

To make your international shipping process simpler, you can print CN22 and CN23 custom forms through Zenstores when you are creating labels.