Linnworks Desktop Documentation

Royal Mail OBA / Tracked - Rules & Guidelines

Overview
This section includes an outline of the rules you must follow when using either a Royal Mail OBA or Royal Mail Tracked integration through Linnworks, as well as information that may be useful before using.

Table of Contents

Printing Labels

OBA / Tracked

Due to rules defined by Royal Mail, it is not possible to print shipping labels for Royal Mail OBA or Tracked services if a Manifest has not been filed within the last 24 hours.

 

OBA

Orders printed using the Royal Mail OBA Shipping Integration produce a standard Royal Mail 6 by 4 inch label.

Info! When printing orders, you can add a safeplace message as an order note to have it printed on a Royal Mail OBA/Tracked label with the safeplace logo. This note will also be sent to Royal Mail with all the other consignment data. The note needs to be added as internal order note in this format: DN:SL: Any text afterwards will be used for a safeplace location. 
Example: DN:SL: Back door.

Tracking Ranges

OBA

Linnworks will automatically allocate the tracking ranges for OBA services instantly when you save the integration. These ranges are automatically refreshed as you print more labels.

Orders printed using the Royal Mail OBA Shipping Integration produce a standard Royal Mail 6 by 4 inch label.

Due to rules defined by Royal Mail, it is not possible to print shipping labels for Royal Mail OBA or Tracked services if a Manifest has not been filed within the last 24 hours.

 

Tracked

When a new service is added the range is automatically requested from Royal Mail by Linnworks and can take up to 3 days for Royal Mail to provide the range.

Shipping Manifest

OBA

A Collection manifest and Sales Order Summary must be handed over to the collection officer and it is highly recommended to print and file the manifest at least 20 minutes prior to the collection.
Manifest and Sales Order Summary can be reprinted at any time, by going to: Settings > Shipping Service > Filed Manifests..png

Two copies should be printed and both should be signed by the driver. Retain one copy for your own records which may then be used if required when submitting a claim for loss

 

Tracked

The Sales order manifest is not available for a tracked integration, however, it is still possible to print the collection manifest

Emergency Manifest

When filing Royal Mail OBA or Royal Mail Tracked manifests, if the manifest fails at any point during the process, the manifest will be marked as completed and an Emergency manifest Id will be created and sent to the user. E.i E1155544550-09082017-1 (The date and the last number will increment if the user filed more than one per day).

The emergency manifest may still be passed to the driver along with the parcels and as soon as the issues are resolved the manifest would get re-submitted by our team automatically and no actions will be required from your side.

Properties

OBA

Using properties for Royal Mail OBA allows you to allocate various specifics at an order level. These are extra details, that may be required by Royal Mail and are not a standard field in Linnworks. As such, to make use of these properties they will need to added as extended properties on Linnworks and then mapped to the appropriate property in the Royal Mail integration. For information on creating/ using extended properties please see the linked guide.

  • Department Number - used by Royal Mail to group billing information by department
    ..png

Use Department Numbers to tailor downloadable report information, check mail volumes by department in the company or identify mailing patterns, value and control costs. 

Shipping to Jersey & Guernsey

In some cases, orders destined for Jersey or Guernsey will be saved with the country code JE or GG respectively. When shipping these orders with Royal Mail, they require the country code on the order to be GB. When printing a label for a JE or GG order, Linnworks will instead submit the GB country code to Royal Mail. This means you don't have to manually edit the order itself, as Linnworks will submit the order data in a format that Royal Mail will accept.

Next Steps

OBA

Tracked