Royal Mail fights to address website outages Parts of the website for the Royal Mail still aren't operational today, after the site reportedly went down over the weekend. Using the website at the time of publication was very slow going, and Reg readers said that the Smartstamp service for printing postage was offline. The website wasn't carrying any message for …
I mean it. They keep using incomptetents to program their site! The 'downgrade' to online postage 2 years ago broke everything, you can't have long names apparently! It also loads every. single. field. in. a. new. page.... it's like it was designed for and by 4 year olds!
Fantastic!! Well done Royal Mail!! You took the old clunky site(that replaced one that worked just fine a few years ago) and replaced it with this. Only it hasn't worked ALL weekend and ALL day Monday!! What great planning, dire economy, hard enough as it is. I know, lets roll out a new site prior to Christmas and not be bothered to tell anyone, the first they will know is when nothing works Monday morning.
I tried to use the Royal Mail web site on Saturday to check on a delivery that I was expecting. The holding page had a list of telephone numbers for various services, including one for tracking deliveries, so I called it, and got a cheerful recorded message which told me that it would be much quicker to use the web site.
Eventually, an automated system asked me to read out the tracking reference, which I did. After a short pause, it told me the stunning news that "Your package is progressing through our network."
So, not only a FUBAR web site, but a truly useless alternative.
Although with the site being so slow it was virtually unusable this morning, for the 10 or so minutes i tried the new website i found they had made things worse and what used to take 2 steps to do now takes you 4 steps.
I really hope they don't require you install Adobe acrobat and refuse to work with foxit reader like they did after their last 'upgrade' to the site
Oh what joy, STILL DOWN! How can this happen? It must be costing millions in lost revenue for online retailers (after being spanked by Google all year long with their Panda updates!!). I was up until midnight last night "using" the site, worked OK in Chrome.
spiny norman-you aren't alone, why bother sending things recorded? Absolute joke(but non funny).
Blood pressure rising.
... given that in the past month they've:
1) Lost nearly £300 worth of kit, and are trying to get out of paying by whimpering that the "insurance" on Spec Dev is for "damage only, not outright loss"
2) Basically stuck their head in the sand -- an interesting way of fielding complaints. Contacting Customer Services is pointless (lots of kind words, bugger all action). The local delivery office either doesn't answer the phone, or someone answers it, utters a choice of "colourful adjectives", hangs up, then leaves it off hook for the rest of the day.
These assclowns need to get their act together, and fast.
Its now 3.30 a day after the original website problems and their site still isn't working properly. It took me 15 minutes to book one parcel as their site was so slow and when the label printed it came out with SAMPLE across it (even though it says Sample will not appear when printed), so it looks like they have fcked it up again and made it only work with the bloatware that is Adobe acrobat reader.
Anyone know of other sites that allow you to print postage online? I know you can do it with paypal but i want to give them my money even less than i do the royalmail at the moment
http://www.postaltechnologyinternational.com/news.php?NewsID=23688
Stuart Curley, chief technology architect at Royal Mail Group, said: “This contract is great news for our business, our customers and our employees. Once the migration is complete, we will be paying for the IT we need as and when we need it, so that we can for the first time bring our IT costs firmly in line with revenues.”
http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/andre-peppiatt/3/87b/a97
Try it in Chrome, it works (just) VERY S L O W L Y.
I've got it now anyway, last winter was a farce, they blamed the weather. This winter is looking mild so what do we do? I know, pull the plug on the website for a week so we can blame the back log on that for this year. Not the fact that we are useless. Honestly, HOW, just HOW can an update cause so much grief? Did the clowns not make a back up? I mean, others have had issues in the past & when it goes tits up roll back to previous version.
Not to mention what dickhead thought now was the right time of year to do this?
This is yet further proof that Royal Mail is one of the worst run major organisations in the UK. Incompetance, failure to take responsibility for its failures yet are the first to complain about streamlining the dreadful service.
Prices go up yet service goes down. If anyone was to compete on a fair footing (Royal Mail are exempt from charging VAT as a right!!) they would be thrashed. Its only their organisation, paid for by the taxpayer over the years that keeps them in the monopoly.
Hopefully DHL will take over and clear out all the incompetant dead wood. meanwhile my business is suffering as I cannot even get pricing from the site let alone postage.
Absolutely atrocious service.
& here we are well into December and the sites are still not working correctly! Price finder DOWN, online postage, more flakey than the choco bar you can buy! "Access denied", "A techinical problem happens"...just some of the random messages you can expect when trying to buy a bloody stamp online!!
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