James and James Fulfilment

Multi-award-winning third-party logistics (3PL) provider, James and James Fulfilment works with growing retailers, eCommerce and SaaS solution providers to fulfil their order and stock management. James and James initially needed a flexible Royal Mail integration to ship its customer’s orders, however as the demand for eCommerce has grown, they now use Intersoft’s delivery management platform using Royal Mail, DPD Netherlands and DPD carrier integrations.

The challenge

In 2018, 70% of the orders James and James Fulfilment shipped for its eCommerce clients were via Royal Mail. So, when Royal Mail retired its own label printing API solution, James and James needed to quickly find a replacement for the tool.

The 3PL had two options – it could either look to develop its own direct integration with Royal Mail or call on the services of a third-party specialist to manage the integration on its behalf. It opted for the latter and in 2018 partnered with Intersoft, an approved Royal Mail partner, to provide its Royal Mail integration.

The solution

Intersoft’s Intelligent Shipper® solution is a seamless, high-quality label production and delivery management solution, and one of very few that is fully approved by Royal Mail.

Intersoft integrated its Royal Mail booking API with James and James’s fulfilment solution allowing the 3PL to print all Royal Mail labels and shipping documentation. As well as fulfilling the production of delivery labels and documentation for James and James, Intersoft’s Intelligent Shipper® solution provided additional value-add features that were not available on Royal Mail’s retired legacy API and would be not achievable if James and James had opted to install its own direct integration.

These features include:

API booking

This provides an efficient solution for high volume shipments. Intelligent Shipper enables direct integration with Royal Mail, offering multiple services including customs documentation production (CN23, proforma invoice and commercial invoices), generating of QR codes for returns shipments, as well as retrieving full tracking history.

Tracked High Volume

Once a shipment is sent on behalf of a retailer, James and James can track the parcel through the delivery journey, pre-empt where there may be delays and see when it’s arrived at its destination.

Tracking dashboard

A clear, user-friendly interface gives James and James quick access to the status of shipments.

Royal Mail 2D barcode scanning

Intelligent Shipper handles the printing of Royal Mail 2D barcodes, which provide more customer tracking information and greater security.

International Max Sort fix

Royal Mail requires all International shipments to be pre-sorted, bagged, and labelled for the mail point for each destination country.  If this is not done correctly, the delivery process is slowed and any costs for the remedial work involved in re-sorting them are passed to the customer.  To prevent such issues arising, Intersoft introduced a routing system to the Royal Mail labels produced for James and James, so they can be pre-sorted by four simple codes for each International Port instead of by thousands of postcodes.

Fully scalable

Whether James and James have 100 or 10,000,000 shipments to make, Intersoft’s solution produces delivery labels in milliseconds, improving efficiency and despatch times.

Automatic label specification updates

Should Royal Mail change the specification for its shipping labels and supporting documentation, Intersoft will automatically make these updates on behalf of James and James, at no additional cost.

The results

Intersoft’s Royal Mail integration has helped James and James grow exponentially as a business, with a 327% increase in the shipments made through it between 2018 and 2019. It has provided a scalable solution that has the flexibility to grow with the delivery demands of the business and is able to offer the fulfilment house an improved level of service to its growing customer base.