Price list for ecommerce: why not?

John Robertson made this Freedom of Information request to Royal Mail Group Limited
This authority is not subject to FOI law, so is not legally obliged to respond (details).
This request has been closed to new correspondence. Contact us if you think it should be reopened.

The request was refused by Royal Mail Group Limited.

Dear Royal Mail Group Limited,

Please email all instructions by senior staff who are not web developers to web developers over the last two years.

If simpler, please email all instructions on the subject of online price lists in a form useful to other web developers, who write shopping cart modules for different post offices around the world.

The reason I think this is important is that the only price list I can find online is likely to change without notice, and so not possible to build-in to a shopping cart module. At the same time, a priority of government at the department for business is to rebalance the economy away from financial services, and so towards physical goods which need to be posted.

regards
John Robertson

PS
http://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/f... a leaflet called "Our prices April 2013" and only online price list I can find, which presented as a leaflet in .pdf form and so likely to change in the detail of format without notice. This makes it impossible for web developers to extract data from it for a long-lived shipping price module to add to a a piece of ecommerce software.

PPS
The cart I am trying to use is WP e-commerce for wordpress, after trying to use Ubercart and Drupal Commerce for Drupal. I think the pattern is the same for all of them: there are nifty modules for USPS, Australia Post and others but nothing for Royal Mail.

John Robertson left an annotation ()

I meant to write that price data alone is important, whether there is some automatic way of putting a stamp on the parcel or not.

With luck, the request makes sense anyway.

Felicity Groombridge (Account suspended) left an annotation ()

Royal Mail will not be emailed your annotation - you need to send a follow up to them.

FOI, Royal Mail Group Limited

Dear Mr Robertson

 

Thank you for your request for information received on 7^th April 2013,
which we are considering under the Freedom of Information Act.  Under the
Act you should expect a reply from us to be sent by 3^rd May 2013, which
is twenty working days from receipt of your request. 

 

If for any reason we are unable to provide you with a full response within
that time, we will contact you explaining the reasons for this and giving
a revised date by which we will reply. 

 

If in the mean time you have any questions or would like to contact us
about your requests, please contact us by telephone (0114) 2414215 or
alternatively email or write to us at the address below.  Please be
assured that we are giving this our attention and will get back to you
shortly.

 

Yours sincerely

 

Marie Teasdale

Company Secretary's Office

Information Rights Officer

[1][Royal Mail Group request email]

 

Royal Mail is a trading name of Royal Mail Group Ltd. Registered in
England and Wales.

Registered number 4138203. Registered office at 100 Victoria Embankment,
LONDON, EC4Y 0HQ

 

 

 

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ROYAL MAIL GROUP LIMITED registered in England and Wales at 100 VICTORIA
EMBANKMENT, LONDON EC4Y 0HQ with the registered company number 04138203

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FOI, Royal Mail Group Limited

1 Attachment

Dear Mr Robertson

 

Please find attached a response to your recent Freedom of Information
Request.

 

Yours sincerely

 

Marie Teasdale

Company Secretary's Office

Information Rights Officer

[1][Royal Mail Group request email]

 

Royal Mail is a trading name of Royal Mail Group Ltd. Registered in
England and Wales.

Registered number 4138203. Registered office at 100 Victoria Embankment,
LONDON, EC4Y 0HQ

 

 

 

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This email and any attachments are confidential and intended for the
addressee only. If you are not the named recipient, you must not use,
disclose, reproduce, copy or distribute the contents of this
communication. If you have received this in error, please contact the
sender and then delete this email from your system.

ROYAL MAIL GROUP LIMITED registered in England and Wales at 100 VICTORIA
EMBANKMENT, LONDON EC4Y 0HQ with the registered company number 04138203

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John Robertson left an annotation ()

Royal Mail Group is one of the UK’s largest employers with around 150,000 current employees. The ‘senior staff’, or management level, at Royal Mail Group ranges from Chief Executives and Directors to shift supervisors in Mail Centres. We consider that to identify information within scope of your request would exceed our obligations as set out under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act – where cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit for Royal Mail Group is set at £450. This represents the cost of one person spending 18 hours in identifying, locating, retrieving or extracting the requested information

We believe that to identify and contact all managers in all areas of Royal Mail Group to establish if they hold emails within scope of your request would significantly exceed our requirements as set out under Section 12 of the Act.

Section 16 of the Act does require that where we are unable to answer your request we provide advice and assistance in regards to how you might consider revising your request to fit within the cost limit. It is not possible to know the specific emails that would fall within scope of your request and therefore it is difficult to suggest ways in which you could narrow your request to fit within the cost limit. However, you may consider focusing your request to cover a smal er specific period of time and relate it to a specific department. It may help if I advise, after reviewing your request, our Ecommerce department confirmed the integration capability for providing Royal Mail prices is not currently available nor is it envisaged to be this year.

Please note any revised request we receive would be considered as a new request and therefore it may be the case that the cost limit or other exemptions may stil apply to the information requested

[...]
Yours sincerely

Marie Teasdale
Information Rights Officer
Company Secretary’s Office

Dear Marie Teasdale

Obviously, a very small number of managers, or perhaps only one, writes instructions to web developers. You may want to explain the process. The reason for such open language is that I do not know the name of the manager, or managers who decide how software is written.

Please answer the original request, with its obvious meaning, within legal time limits.

John Robertson

FOI, Royal Mail Group Limited

Dear Mr Robertson

Thank you for your email which we received on the 26th April 2013. As was explained in our original response to your request Royal Mail has a very large number of managers and to contact each and every one to ask whether they have issued instructions to web developers would clearly be a very large task.

In light of your email we will narrow our search to just those managers who are directly responsible for matters of Ecommerce and could have responsibility for issuing this type of instruction. Please be assured that we are dealing with your request and will issue you a response as soon as possible. As a result of this clarification it will be necessary, once again, to consider your request under the terms Freedom of Information Act. Under the Act you should expect a reply from us to be sent by 28th May 2013, which is twenty working days from receipt of your request, however as noted above we will endeavour to respond as soon as we have the relevant information available

If for any reason we are unable to provide you with a full response within that time, we will contact you explaining the reasons for this and giving a revised date by which we will reply.

If in the mean time you have any questions or would like to contact us about your request, please contact us by telephone (0114) 2414215 or alternatively email or write to us at the address below. Please be assured that we are giving this our attention and will get back to you shortly.

Yours Sincerely

Daniel Tulp
Company Secretary's Office
Information Rights Officer
[Royal Mail Group request email]

Information Rights Team
(Freedom of Information)
Royal Mail Sheffield
2nd Floor, Pond Street
Sheffield
S98 6HR

Royal Mail is a trading name of Royal Mail Group Ltd. Registered in England and Wales.
Registered number 4138203. Registered office at 100 Victoria Embankment, LONDON, EC4Y 0HQ

-----Original Message-----
From: John Robertson [mailto:[FOI #156434 email]]
Sent: 26 April 2013 18:11
To: FOI
Subject: Re: Freedom of Information Request (Our Ref MTEE-96LDZT)

Dear Marie Teasdale

Obviously, a very small number of managers, or perhaps only one,
writes instructions to web developers. You may want to explain the
process. The reason for such open language is that I do not know
the name of the manager, or managers who decide how software is
written.

Please answer the original request, with its obvious meaning,
within legal time limits.

John Robertson

-----Original Message-----

Dear Mr Robertson

Please find attached a response to your recent Freedom of
Information
Request.

Yours sincerely

Marie Teasdale

Company Secretary's Office

Information Rights Officer

[1][Royal Mail Group request email]

Royal Mail is a trading name of Royal Mail Group Ltd. Registered
in
England and Wales.

Registered number 4138203. Registered office at 100 Victoria
Embankment,
LONDON, EC4Y 0HQ

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This email and any attachments are confidential and intended for the addressee only. If you are not the named recipient, you must not use, disclose, reproduce, copy or distribute the contents of this communication. If you have received this in error, please contact the sender and then delete this email from your system.

ROYAL MAIL GROUP LIMITED registered in England and Wales at 100 VICTORIA EMBANKMENT, LONDON EC4Y 0HQ with the registered company number 04138203

**********************************************************************

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FOI, Royal Mail Group Limited

1 Attachment

Dear Mr Robertson

 

Please find attached a response to your recent Freedom of Information
Request.

 

Yours sincerely

 

Marie Teasdale

Company Secretary's Office

Information Rights Officer

[1][Royal Mail Group request email]

 

Royal Mail is a trading name of Royal Mail Group Ltd. Registered in
England and Wales.

Registered number 4138203. Registered office at 100 Victoria Embankment,
LONDON, EC4Y 0HQ

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

**********************************************************************
This email and any attachments are confidential and intended for the
addressee only. If you are not the named recipient, you must not use,
disclose, reproduce, copy or distribute the contents of this
communication. If you have received this in error, please contact the
sender and then delete this email from your system.

ROYAL MAIL GROUP LIMITED registered in England and Wales at 100 VICTORIA
EMBANKMENT, LONDON EC4Y 0HQ with the registered company number 04138203

**********************************************************************

References

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John Robertson left an annotation ()

A tourist guide to Royal Mail and small ecommerce shops for web developers (http://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2015/06...) describes the basic royal mail services for small shopkeepers, ebayers and such. It's a page on a blog post that might help web developers who want to write a good table-quote postage module for RM's four world zones, or someone who wants to write a module with some of the figures already filled-in each year.

Mintee left an annotation ()

When it comes to ecommerce this company http://www.sklep-intymny.pl/ tends to be the master of solving problems - you can always try to learn from their experience.