Nobody Home

International courier services are now so affordable, there’s no reason not to get your parcels collected from your doorstep and have your deliveries tracked via a professional B2B courier service like TNT, Fedex, Parcelforce, DHL, and others we work with.

However, there may be times when you can’t be home to receive your parcel within the allotted delivery times or on a certain day (in the UK this is generally between 9am-5.30pm, but can be later). In these circumstances, we suggest you get your parcel delivered to another address where somebody can be there to receive it, but wouldn’t it be great if you could have it delivered to a secure unit and collect it any time you wanted?

Courier companies are always looking for workarounds in this area and it seems several countries have started to find them.

Parcel delivery terminal, Russia

The Final Mile

Your parcel might easily have been up and down or around the country before it reaches you as its final destination. Couriers work out of sorting hubs and depots to get your parcel from A to B. It’s the final mile that can be problematic when people aren’t home and this is where Australia’s parcel terminals and ParcelPoint come in handy.

Parcel terminals are like lockers where your parcel can be delivered, ready for you to collect at any time, day or night, and ParcelPoints are newsagents who accept your delivery on your behalf, so you can collect from them at a time convenient to you.

We might not have all of this available in the UK, but it’s certainly heading in the right direction. Like you, we’d love to see all of these options available across the board in future.

What else would you like to see?

More on parcel terminals.

More on ParcelPoint.

'Round up your Pound' total: One year on

What is Round up your Pound?

We introduced a facility that gives customers the option to round up their checkout total to the nearest pound and whatever that amount is, we give every penny of it to our selected charity. Parcel delivery customers have been enthusiastically rounding up their pounds and over the course of the year we have given more than £3,000 to four different charities.

This is all thanks to our customers because without your kindness the scheme doesn’t work. Let’s face it, will you really miss that 17p or 35p? Probably not, but it takes an act of generosity to tick the box and donate it, so thank you – a Big Blue Thankyou from the Superhero himself and all the team at P4D.

How do we choose our charities?

We’ve been fortunate enough to work with some extremely lovely people to get our scheme off the ground after the initial launch with Teenage Cancer Trust. It’s been fun along the way working with Rachel at the British Heart Foundation, there were a few tears on our visit to the heartwarming Helen & Douglas House, and we’re all keen to Bank our Bras with Against Breast Cancer. Together, we raised a lot of money and this is what it’s all about. We’ve a number of recommended charities for Round up your Pound and we’d like to support them all. Of course we can’t, but please do send in your suggestions and we’ll do our best to include as many charities as possible as time goes on. We change our charity every three months.

Fundraising totals

Thanks to the mighty Slurpy Studios, who also brought our Superhero to life, we have an interactive present on our charity page that automatically colours up as the money comes in, so we can all watch the donations increase. It’s surprising how fast it moves!

This feature has been very popular with our customers who can see the results of their donations and also with our charity recipients who watch with earnest as we reach milestones like our recent £1k record breaker for Against Breast Cancer who said: “Please pass on our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has been involved, the employees of P4D and all of your incredibly generous customers for participating.”

Watch the gift grow.

Year two

We’ll continue to update you on Round up your Pound activity via our blog and social media pages like Facebook and Twitter. Next we’ll be supporting St John Ambulance and we’ve plenty of ideas in store for this one, so watch this space: www.p4d.co.uk/charity.

–>    THANKS AGAIN FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT    <–

]]> http://www.p4d.co.uk/blog/2012/05/rounding-up-with-thanks/feed/ 0 http://www.p4d.co.uk/blog/2012/04/parcelforce-handling/ http://www.p4d.co.uk/blog/2012/04/parcelforce-handling/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:46:21 +0000 nat http://www.p4d.co.uk/blog/?p=1412 Continue reading →]]> Parcelforce have kindly informed us about an issue at one of their hubs last night. Any parcels passing through the main parcel delivery hub at Coventry may be subject to delays, but of course they are working incredibly hard to avoid this.

Why does your parcel go through a hub?

When you send a parcel it doesn’t get collected and driven directly to its destination, all parcels pass through parcel delivery depots and sorting hubs. Here they are sorted and routed on to the next destination. Parcels may pass through several depots or hubs, and they can move up and down the country before reaching their final destinations.

If you missed it, we recently blogged about 21st Century Parcel Delivery with a video to show you these sorting areas handling thousands of parcels per hour – pretty impressive!  It means your parcel gets from A to B as though it were delivered by hand on a straight route – blink, and you’ll miss all of the background effort.

Parcelforce

If you’ve placed a P4D order with Parcelforce and it appears to be delayed, please be patient. If you’ve further difficulty, visit our Support page for help.

Exhibiting at a trade show

It’s common sense to know that you need to find the right show for your business, one that will attract the right kinds of clientele; people who are interested in your product or service and are able to start using it straight away. But what about the rest? It’s not just a case of turning up, that’s for sure.

1. You’ve paid for your stand, what exactly do you get for your money?
Typically, you’ll pay for a shell. Your stand skeleton will be custom built by the hosts of the show and your name will appear at the top – make sure your hosts spell your name correctly! At this point, all the stands look the same. The hard part is up to you.

2. The stand is built, now make it your own
A hidden cost of exhibiting is marketing materials and stand decoration. You can pay extortionate amounts to hire equipment, but essentially all you need is to demonstrate explicitly what it is you do and stand out from the crowd. Create your own world.

3. Don’t just sit there! Meet your audience…
You won’t do well at any show if you don’t give off a welcoming vibe. You’re away from the office and your visitors are taking time out of their schedule too – it’s up to you to make it worthwhile for both of you. Don’t sell hard; communicate well.

With any luck, you’ll attract the right kinds of attention!

GOOD LUCK.

“To launch the high quality TV channel TNT in Belgium we placed a big red push button on an average Flemish square of an average Flemish town. A sign with the text “Push to add drama” invited people to use the button. And then we waited…

TNT. We know drama.”

Parcelforce say the accident has delayed their southbound trailers:

“We were able to divert the majority, ensuring that we maintain our delivery guarantees as far as possible. However, those destined for our Romford, Medway and Tonbridge depots were caught up in the motorway closure and unfortunately this will result in some deliveries scheduled for today in these depots being delayed. We have plans in place already to deliver as much as possible of these late arrivals, but where this is not possible the parcels will be prioritised for delivery tomorrow. We will regrettably have to suspend our delivery guarantee for any timed and next day service parcels scheduled for delivery today in these affected depots. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this causes.”

We thank the carriers for letting us know about the situation. If you have a parcel destined for any of these areas and don’t want your parcel delivery rescheduled if it can’t get there today, please email your order number to customers@p4d.co.uk to let us know.

Thank you.

They have also experienced problems in Southampton and Exeter, but these are almost fully resolved.

Thanks Yodel for letting us know.

If you’ve had problems tracking a parcel delivery destined for any of these areas, email us on customers@p4d.co.uk and we’ll advise you on the status of the depot based on the latest information we have.

Courier services over Easter

It’s Easter next week and besides chocolate bunnies and treasure hunts, there are some parcel delivery interruptions to consider. Courier companies don’t deliver on Bank Holidays, so you’ll need to factor this in to your parcel delivery plans. Yodel has kindly provided us with a chart for the Easter Bank Holidays, but in essence, it’s this simple:

Yodel 24 Hour Delivery Service

Our Yodel service is 24 hour – that is, collected one day and delivered the next. If you send two or more parcels at the same time they also offer a cheap courier consignment rate of only £6.99 per parcel, which is clearly displayed in our quote results.

Place your parcel delivery order: Wednesday 4 April
Parcel collected on Thursday 5 April
Parcel delivered on Tuesday 10 April*
*unless you specifically booked and paid extra for a Saturday delivery, in which case, your parcel will be delivered on Saturday 7 April.

Alternatively…

Place your parcel delivery order: Thursday 5 April
Parcel collected on Tuesday 10 April
Parcel delivered on Wednesday 11 April

After this, the service returns to normal:

Place your parcel delivery order: Tuesday 10 April
Parcel collected on Wednesday 11 April
Parcel delivered on Thursday 12 April

All couriers

Remember that all our courier companies will be working to these same deadlines and none will deliver on a Bank Holiday.

P4D | Parcels for Delivery

The P4D offices are also closed on Bank Holidays. We strongly advise that you email us on customers@p4d.co.uk for the fastest response with your P4D order number (eg. P4D001122), the collection postcode, and an indication of the problem.

We hope this information is useful.

“TNT fully fuelled to meet customers’ needs

More than two-thirds of drivers at seven fuel delivery companies have voted to go on strike, forcing the Government to consider bringing in the army to deliver fuel if the industrial action goes ahead.

But TNT has reassured its customers that it will keep delivering on its promises and meeting their requirements in the face of any potential disruption. The company holds extensive stocks of fuel at each of its 50-plus depots, enabling it to keep the country’s largest fleet of express delivery vehicles on the road.

TNT centrally controls each depot’s fuel requirements across the UK, making sure that call-offs fully match operational needs. By using a common dashboard system, consumption and reserves are centrally checked and each local stock level is managed appropriately.

As well as holding its own fuel reserves, TNT also led the way in the deployment of electric vehicles and currently has the country’s largest fleet of EVs in the express delivery business.

Acknowledging the reliance on more traditional fuels for the majority of its fleet, TNT also recently launched an ambitious upgrade of its line-haul and pick-up and delivery fleet as a key part of keeping costs down for customers, improving efficiency, retaining reliability and driving down CO2 emissions. This includes 100 new “Cheetah Fastback” trailers; 190 new 5-tonne vehicles and 60 new 7.5-tonne trucks.”

TNT Press Release, 26 March 2012

That’s right. You might think parcel delivery is pretty dull; courier services are a dry subject? Not with the Big Blue Hero around, and not with P4D! Here’s a short picture diary on how the P4D Superhero took off …and not only to deliver some parcels :o)

We produced a Superhero storyboard...

...and Slurpy Studios turned this in to a cartoon (click to watch the video).

We happened upon a blue morph suit and brought our cartoon character to life...

...and he made the BBC News.

Now famous, our Superhero needed a makeover so we got him a new suit...

...and our new and improved Superhero made it to the O2 Arena.

He read the news...

He gave some more interviews...

…and he’s only just gotten started!

What’s next?
Watch this space

Big Superhero smiles all round!

Since we first blogged about the event only eleven days ago, we’ve raised enough money to plant another five trees. We now have eighty trees in total, which means we’ve raised £800+ thanks to our carbon-conscious customers.

We met other companies who are using OxTreeGen for the ‘greater Greener good’ and learned more about the kinds of projects the money we donate is used for. Thanks Mark and Nick of OxTreeGen for inviting us and supplying us with tea and breakfast! We look forward to seeing how tall our trees grow.

Trees from the nursery

Working together

Chef :o)

Colin getting stuck in!

Planting

P4D's Nat & Colin

Packaging your parcel

What many people new to courier services don’t realise is that their parcel is shipped alongside hundreds of thousands of other parcels. Along most of its journey, your parcel doesn’t pass through the hands of individuals, but through the hands of robots. That’s why we don’t recommend a courier service for fragile items, by the way. It’s why we have a detailed and lengthy FAQ about how to package your parcel to protect it along the way. It’s why we’re sharing this fantastic video, so you can see for yourself that it’s not only the one delivery driver you see that plays such an important role in your parcel delivery…

The courier service network is a mammoth, well-oiled machine, making better and better use of new technologies all the time. This sorting hub for TaxiPost in Belgium is spread over 10,000 square meters handling 15,000 parcels per hour. There are automated conveyors, robotics, sophisticated image capture and scanning; software, cameras, mirrors and – phew! – just watch for yourself the entire colossal process.

Related blog: Amazon at Christmas by Bruno Vincent (Getty)

Thanks to Paul at e-swoosh for sharing this video with us :)

Diet, Lifestyle, and Cancer

A little different from other cancer charities, Against Breast Cancer focuses on secondary spread of cancer – that is, how to prevent cancer from spreading to other parts of the body. They’ve been working on a specific diet and lifestyle campaign: DietCompLyf, which “is a multi-centre clinical trial investigating the diet, lifestyle, complementary and alternative treatments breast cancer patients may use.” They recently reached a milestone in their research that allows them to publish some of their results.

Against Breast Cancer research campaign

The DietCompLyf campaign launched in 1997. Now, 3400 breast cancer patients, 56 recruitment centres, countless blood tests, lifestyle assessments and food diaries later, this information can be used to help breast cancer patients. What an achievement for the charity, relying solely on donations.

“The DietCompLyf study has been fully funded by supporters of Against Breast Cancer, we would like to thank everyone who has contributed so far.

The Diet and Lifestyle study represents just one branch of our research at the Against Breast Cancer Research Unit based at the University of Westminster. We urgently need your support us to help ensure that, we continue our research to improve detection and increase survival after diagnosis, and ultimately find a vaccine against breast cancer.”

- Against Breast Cancer

We think you’ll agree this is important research and we’re proud to be supporting the cause. Read the latest results of the DietCompLyf study and next time you book a parcel delivery, please Round up your Pound for them!

Please read their letter, below, which lets us all know how the money we raised will be spent. In true Round up your Pound style we rounded up the £818.40 to £1000, so that we could provide the full 48 art room sessions. The Round up your Pound scheme is growing so fast, we know we’ll get at least this for Against Breast Cancer (our current charity) with £500 already raised in the first month. We’ve more charities on the waiting list for the scheme and we hope the totals can just keep on getting bigger and bigger. Thank you.

£1,000 for Helen & Douglas House

Thank you letter

We've raised £750 for OxTreeGen

In May last year we launched our carbon offsetting initiative, so customers could choose to reduce their carbon footprint on parcel delivery. It’s been incredibly popular with many customers taking pride in the scheme, as we do.

Sune at Stovesonline Limited has been a champion since the very beginning:

“I like P4D because the staff are friendly, responsive, helpful, and competent. We now also carbon offset all our orders through their Going Green campaign.”
Sune Nightingale

All of the money we raise through the Green Scheme is given to OxTreeGen who plant trees on our behalf. We’ve already passed £750 their way for 75 trees to be planted.

On the 16th we’ll join OxTreeGen for a tree-planting event to contribute to one of their projects in person:

“We are working with the landowner to plant 5 hectares of permanent woodland over the next 2 years. The area is set just a couple of hundred yards from the river Thames and for our planting day we will be “in filling” – this is the process of replacing trees which have failed to establish. This gives you the opportunity to see trees at different stages of growth.

This event will form part of Climate Week.”

OxTreeGen

You can watch the P4D forest grow online as more and moe donations come in at our checkout. Thank you to everybody who has supported the scheme.

Last year we invented the P4D Superhero as a visual aid to explain our complex business model. When he proved to be a rip-roaring success, we wanted to find a product to advertise him; something engaging, interesting, not too traditional… we couldn’t think where to start, but one quick chat and a cappuccino later, Jody found us the perfect solution.

These black bookmarks are made from recycled tyres – we agreed, perfectly fitting for a company involved in the parcel delivery industry, especially one that already has a very successful Green campaign! They were the right size and shape for the Superhero and the print quality on recycled tyres is surprisingly flawless. Best of all, they’re really tactile and they smell fantastic :o)

We’ve worked our way through hundreds upon hundreds of these little bookmarks – they’ve been stretched, sniffed at, ogled over and we nearly ran out on the P4D stand at the Business Start Up Show last November! We were interviewed and praised for our brand image at the show – if you missed it, here’s P4D’s Colin talking to Neil Humphrey: startuptv.co.uk meets P4D.

Next came the new P4D Superhero pens – these just arrived in the P4D office yesterday and they’ll be winging their way to Business 2012 next month, so pop by our stand (A56) to nab one… and a bookmark of course! If you need any promotional materials yourself, Jody not only has an extensive catalogue, she’s also one of the friendliest, most helpful people to deal with in business. We’ve come to know her so well over the years, whether she’s in our office sending parcels, or if she’s discussing marketing material, she’s become part of the P4D family. Contact Jody.

What is a consignment?

In this instance, there are two definitions of a consignment, depending on the courier. Neither is to be confused with an adhoc parcel delivery (one parcel). A consignment is a multiple parcel booking (more than one parcel from the same collection address at the same time). TNT judges consignments on destination, so the parcels must be collected from the same address at the same time, going to the same destination. Yodel considers volume, so you could be sending parcels to different addresses.

Yodel

A standard delivery with Yodel (using the former DHL Domestic service) and on the standard weight restriction will currently cost you £8.99… now this seems like a fair enough price, but if you’re sending more than one parcel this price drops to only £6.99. Therefore, it’s much more cost effective to send your parcels all at the same time.

TNT

We’ve also introduced a new TNT consignment service. Next time you have a few parcels to send – so long as they’re all going to the same address, look out for TNT as they may now be a viable alternative to save more money on parcel delivery.

Getting a quote

As you all know by now, we upgraded our quote results system recently, which – we should add – has gone down a storm! Simply enter the weight and dimensions of your parcels (if you struggle with the measurements or have an odd-shaped parcel we’ve a new FAQ on the subject), the collection and delivery postcodes, and Bob’s your uncle – all of your options appear in price order.

You can sort the results using the arrows at the top.

You won’t need to manually input all of your measurements either, if your parcels are all the same there’s the option just to copy your first entry across.

We’ve even added a distinct alert to remind you of the cheaper consignment price for Yodel consignment pricing, just in case you forget to add your second parcel.

Get a quote now.

New quote system

Neil Humphrey of Studio Maximus caught us at the end of a very busy ‘Day 1′ of the show when things were a little less hectic to talk about brand and standing out from the crowd. He was at the Show looking for stands that caught his eye and says he was impressed by both our animated and real Superhero, boxed backdrop, and smart blue attire.

P4D’s Colin (The Major) gives a fantastic off-the-cuff interview about our experience, published by startuptv.co.uk, a digital magazine that claims to stick “a pin in the pomposity of business” to bring you engaging business news – we certainly like their style.

P4D's Colin & Chris with Neil (right) at the Show

Colin chats to Neil about Brand

>> Watch the full interview <<

Find P4D on stand A56

As Colin says, our intention was to have an impact and be clear about what it is we do. The “quality of the footfall, the number of people who sought us out, and the interest shown in what we do” means we feel confident about our stand at Business 2012 next month >> come and find us there on stand A56.

Tickets to Business 2012 are FREE and keynote speakers include Richard Branson, Lord Sugar, and Cherie Blair with hundreds of seminars to attend.

P4D Superhero

As for our real Superhero, he made the BBC News last time around – I wonder what he’ll get up to this time? :o) Be sure to send us your fan photos from Business 2012 and keep up with his progress on our blog. You’re also the first to find out here that he’s currently getting an upgrade with a new suit set to be revealed at Business 2012!

Here’s a sneak preview:

Superhero in the making!

See you there!

Stolen brand identify

It’s not uncommon to have your brand identity stolen and used for unscrupulous purposes. In recent months, we at P4D have had to tackle a competitor using our name
in their Adwords campaign, a scraping attack in Vancouver (your website copied in entirety), and one of our more recent blog posts being presented in full on somebody else’s website in their own name. It can often be time consuming and frustrating, but going through the correct channels gets the right results.

Fedex has helpfully provided examples on their website of fraudulent emails, which we think is a fantastic way of helping customers easily recognise a spam email, yet it also demonstrates well how real these emails can look.

Online savvy

Fedex has also listed plenty of advice about protecting yourself online. We’d recommend you take a look, parcel delivery or otherwise, and familiarise yourself with the terminology as well as the tools at your disposal to fight fraud.

Debra runs dBwebdesigns, offering web design and development services, plus hosting and domain help for small businesses around Oxfordshire. Like us, Debra also works with OxTreeGen to reduce her carbon footprint. You can carbon offset your deliveries with P4D and for every site Debra builds, she plants a tree with them too. It’s all for a fantastic cause. Here’s “I am a Website” from the lady herself. Enjoy!

In case you missed it we thought we’d share Google’s brilliant Valentines Day graph. Simply go to Google and search for the following:

sqrt(cos(x))cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5

Happy Valentines Day from all the team at P4D :o)

Happy Valentines Day!

That date in February that sparks many a row…

You get home at the end of a long day and your partner has a face like a black cloud. You instantly panic – Birthday? Anniversary? What have you forgotten?

On Tuesday it’s Valentines Day and we’re giving you a gentle nudge here in the right direction :o) You could send your partner an almighty present and we’ll deliver your parcel anywhere in the UK for only £6.99 with City Link, but if you can’t manage that, at least get a card for your loved one!

Against Breast Cancer

We’re currently supporting Against Breast Cancer for our Round up your Pound scheme. P4D customers have already raised nearly £150 in less than 10 days and here’s another way to support such a fantastic cause.

You can buy and send Valentines cards directly from their website: have them delivered blank to you, or delivered with a hand-written message to your surprise recipient. They’ve a fantastic selection of cards, from cute and smoochy, to vintage and stylish, to cheeky and saucy. Buy yours today with 50% off your first card and get it there in time for Tuesday!

“Happy Valentines Day” to our P4D customers, we love you all :o)

We allow couriers until 7pm to collect and deliver your parcels. If it goes past 7pm, or you’re a business and you close at 5pm, see our Help page for more information on re-bookings and refunds.

Areas affected:

Leeds
Hull
Stockton
Preston
Hailsham
Cambridge
Sandwell
Northampton
Milton Keynes
Sheffield
Lincoln
Scunthorpe
Goole

Sort quote results by whether or not you need a printer, price, collection day, and estimated delivery date. There’s extra info on each service should you need it.

We hope you like the new look and as always we welcome your feedback, so let us know if you have any comments. Since we build all our systems in-house, we can respond quickly to customer feedback.

Price drop

2011 was a fantastic year for P4D and 2012 is already shaping up to be a winner. We’ve taken on many new customers in recent months, we’re hiring a new member of staff, and we’ve smashed our record for the charity scheme we introduced last year with more than £800 raised for Helen and Douglas House.

Prices for some of our most popular services have come down in price, including TNT international and Yodel 48, which has dropped from £8.99 to £7.90. Parcelforce have lower rates for deliveries across Europe and Fedex offer a slick Next Day service to the US, so whatever your need, we aim to have the cheaper solution.

We hope 2012 got off to a good start for you too :o)

All the team at P4D

With hundreds of exhibitors, more than 200 seminars and over 200 workshops you’ll need those three days to get round it all! As a business owner you’ll have all the inspiration and motivation you need in this one space to push your ideas and plans forward, plus, we’ll be there on stand A56 looking forward to meeting you all :o)

Your official invite from Richard Branson:

Don’t forget to come find us by the Regus Live Feed area (where the cafe/bar is conveniently located!). ‘The Boss’ and Founder of P4D, Steve Abel, is also running his own seminar on Monday 19 March at 1.30pm in the seminar hall behind us.

See you there – it’s gonna be GOOD!

“We look at the whole woman: her tumour, her response to the tumour and her environment through three interlinked areas of research: Tumour biology, Immunology, and Diet & Lifestyle.”
- Our Approach, Against Breast Cancer

Fundraising

We’re happy to announce that P4D customers have already rounded up £66 in less than a week (thank you!) and we hope to keep going at this phenomenal rate.

Bra Bank

As well as this, the charity has countless fantastic initiatives to raise money for such a worthy cause. They offer many options to recycle for charity, including bra recycling – send off one or two by post or find your local Bra Bank! There’s an impressive events calendar for 2012 with challenges if you want to cycle, run, walk, or even sail, with locations stretching from Vietnam to Ben Nevis, to Lapland.

They’re also currently selling this beautiful vintage inspired calendar with 40% off, so get in quick before they all go! We look forward to working with the team behind such inspired ideas to support women with breast cancer and hope you will too.

More about them here.

Against Breast Cancer 2012 calendar

P4D is not ‘a-price-comparison-site.com’, but because we offer services from many different courier companies, we save you the bother of getting quotes from each and every one of them. We have all the prices in one place, and the best bit is – our prices are lower… for the same fantastic service :) Get a quote.

How does it work for P4D? More About Us
More Frequently Asked Questions from P4D

If you experience a problem with your collection or parcel delivery please email your P4D order number (eg. P4D445566) to customers@p4d.co.uk letting us know if you’d like to re-book or refund your order. You’ll find more information about this on our Help page.

For regular Service Updates on all courier services bookmark this page.

Areas affected:

Gateshead and Sunderland
Manchester
Woodford and Enfield
Hitchin
Kidderminster
St Neots
Cambridge
Sandwell
Stoke
Chesterfield
Scunthorpe

Helen & Douglas House

We’d like to offer an enormous “Thank You!” to all the P4D customers who rounded up their pound this charity quarter. By donating your spare change at our checkout you’ve raised a *whopping* £818.40 for the very deserving Helen & Douglas House. This is especially impressive since fundraising ran over the festive season when money is tighter than usual. Your generosity means the children at Helen & Douglas House who are suffering with terminal illness, and their families, can continue to be supported by the wonderful staff at Helen House for young children and Douglas House for young adults.

We were invited on a supporter tour last year and so we know for ourselves just how warranting the cause is of this donation >> read more about the tour.

We’ll leave you with the ‘Live Deep’ video from the hospice, which demonstrates in two minutes how valuable their work is. Until the end of April we will now be supporting Against Breast Cancer – let’s hope we can generate just as much, if not more, as the Round up your Pound scheme grows :o)

If you were due a parcel delivery or collection in this area and it hasn’t succeeded, email your P4D order number (eg. P4D445566) to customers@p4d.co.uk and let us know if you’d like to re-book or refund it.

More on our Help page about re-bookings.

Tuesday 31 January

There are weather warnings for ice across the UK today.

P4D is expanding and on the look-out for a customer service representative. You’ll be fast, efficient, proactive, and work well as part of a small(ish) team. The position is full time Monday-Friday with the option to work extra hours evenings and weekends from home. Hours in the office are between 8.30-6pm on a rota. You’ll be responsible for fielding out customer service emails to relevant members of the team as well as dealing with them directly yourself, and you’ll also be picking up the phone during office hours.

You’ll need to know your way around a Mac or PC and be comfortable learning new technical systems. Workload can be demanding and a positive attitude is key, since you’ll be working with a dedicated, friendly bunch of people who work closely together to make P4D the success it is today. Our attitude is not corporate, stuffy or antiquated – we’re keen on innovation, progression, and enjoying our jobs!

Please send your CV and a covering letter to colin@p4d.co.uk, letting us know if there are any dates you can’t make for interview in the coming days. We look forward to meeting a new member of the team and welcoming you on board. nb. Agencies need not apply: please don’t contact us or add us to a mailing list – thank you.

Update 6 Feb 2012 >> This vacancy has now been filled.

Not only do you get cheaper rates if you’re not sending parcels in large volumes, but you also get an alternative choice of courier service when the worst things happen. Next, should DHL rates come back down and TNT rates go up, there is the option to immediately switch courier company again and, not only that, there’s also Fedex and Parcelforce to choose from too.

All of the courier services we offer are competitive, but sometimes it’s not all about price, sometimes it’s about a simple preference on carrier, and that’s fine too.

Here are some key services you may or may not already know about:

Fedex international parcel delivery – America

Fedex offer a fantastic next day delivery service to the US. Parcels are collected from a UK address one day and arrive at Stansted Airport that evening. The flight leaves Stansted for Memphis and the parcels arrive in the early hours of the next day where they are sorted and loaded on to Fedex vans for delivery to cities all around the USA. Pretty slick service…

TNT international parcel delivery – Business

If you’re running a business, TNT are particularly strong across Europe and you can send your parcel fast, or send it cheap, through their range of different services tailored to meet your needs. As we already pointed out, their rates just came down with P4D.

Parcelforce international parcel delivery – Europe

Parceforce also do fantastic rates across Europe, for both businesses and residential customers. They also offer a same day collection service, as do Fedex and TNT.

Whichever service you choose, you needn’t worry about how to decide. Simply add the weight and measurements of your parcel to our Quote Box, select the collection and delivery points, and we’ll retrieve all the available services you can choose from depending on what’s most important to you.

Book an international parcel delivery now

They’ve reported there will be few temporary ‘Games lanes’ available to reduce the impact of increased traffic and therefore they’re looking at alternative delivery routes.

Read the full story on City Link Live.

Looking at the image below you might think Emma simply makes wedding cards, but you’d be wrong. In fact, the pictures she makes (available framed or unframed) are miniature origami replicas of the original wedding outfits her brides and grooms wore on their wedding day. The pictures are presented as gifts for wedding anniversaries.

Origami Wedding Anniversary

We’d like to thank Emma for always singing our praises and twice now she’s very kindly brought us chocolates to thank us for our customer service – and might we say, this always goes down well with the P4D Team :o)

Of course we won’t be bribed and this is credit where credit is due. Emma has come up with a pretty inventive use for the historic Japanese art of paper folding and these are beautiful gifts we’re sure many couples would appreciate.

Order yours or send Emma a message. The more you buy from Emma, the more she will need our parcel delivery services, and the more chocolates we all receive! ;o)

http://papergifts.me.uk

What more is there to be said? Book now!

Stardust

Original image

What is it?

Evernote

Say you’re arranging a birthday party. You’ve seen an outfit you like and took a picture on your phone; you’ve found the perfect venue online so you’ve bookmarked the url on your iPad – then you saw a conversation on a forum about a reliable DJ, so you’ve taken a screengrab of it on your computer to remember their name. Of course, your friends are asking where to post your larger gifts to, so you tell them they can send them with P4D for only £6.99 and you want to share our url ;o) [Plug over.] Now you have all these bits and pieces of information in various formats on various different devices – what do you do with them?

You download Evernote. For free.
Keep all your electronic notes in one place and share them with others.

Case study

We think it’s brilliant, and it’s no surprise people are talking a lot about it. Here we share one of their stories we thought particularly good. If Evernote becomes a great hit for parcel delivery and pallet delivery services, perhaps we’ll make our own video diary one day :o)

View video on the Evernote website

Deliver by 7.30am
Parcels up to 10kg, £45

Deliver by 9am
Parcels up to 20kg, £25

Deliver by 12 noon
Parcels up to 20kg, £13

Services are available for heavier weights too. Get an instant quote at www.P4D.co.uk.

All of these timed delivery services are provided by City Link. Your parcel needs to be booked in by 11pm. It will be collected the next day, any time between 9am-5.30pm (sometimes later) and delivered by the time you’ve chosen.

It’s great to know more and more people of every generation are embracing new technologies that allow greater choice and flexibility in the retail arena, as is our own slogan for the online parcel delivery booking process: Save time, Save money. However, this week we spotted an even greater participation in online media from the senior citizens of Clark Retirement Community on YouTube. We think you’ll agree this ‘LipDub’ is simply charming!

If you don’t have an account with us, sign up to get one and you’ll then have full access to all our software. This means we’ll remember your collection address next time you book and now your delivery addresses too with our new ‘black book’ feature. This can only save you time… why not try it?

If you already have an account with us – thanks to Chris, next time you book, you’ll see a drop down under the delivery postcode box called “Select Address”. We hope you find this new feature useful.