Our Royal Mail (OBA) integration works in the following way:
When a label is created for an order, the data is sent to our label supplier, who provides us with the labels you create.
When you are ready to ship your orders using these labels, you then need to generate a manifest. What happens here is, the label data is sent to Royal Mail and locked in on your account. Once an order has been manifested, it cannot be cancelled.
If a label is created, with its Collection Date set to the same day, it is imperative that the labels are manifested on that same day. If this is not done, our label suppliers will manifest any open labels for that day. When this is done, you will need to request a member of the Support Team retrieve this Manifest from our labels suppliers on your behalf.
It is incorrect to create labels with a Collection Date different to the one when you plan to manifest.
Creating labels for future shipments
Some of our customers may want to create labels to be shipped at a future date. For example, some of our customers will process orders on Sunday, ready to be shipped on Monday. If they were to create labels with a collection date of Sunday, and then not manifest the labels, they would run into the problem outlined above.
The correct method here is quite simple:
Select the orders you wish to create labels for.
Click Ship and proceed to the label creation page.
Enter any relevant details as normal.
Before you create labels adjust the Collection Date (highlighted in the screenshot below) to the date you want to manifest and ship your orders. This can be done individually per order, or in bulk for all selected orders.
Create labels as normal.
It's that simple! All you need to do after this is generate your manifest as normal on the day your shipments are to be collected!
What does generating a Manifest actually do?
In ChannelGrabber, when you go to manifest your labels, the system will show you the number of "Open Orders" you have to be manifested. This value is just a counter of labels created, which gets reset when you generate the manifest. The data may not match the actual number of your open labels if you have not followed the advice above.
Clicking Generate to generate a manifest sends a request to our label suppliers to manifest all open labels for the date in question. If you have set the Collection Date and Manifested correctly, you will always get the right labels manifested.
I forgot to generate a Manifest yesterday and I have orders missing from today's Manifest - what do I do?
If you generate labels, which then get manifested by our label supplier, you may not be able to access the manifest for those labels. If this occurs, simply ask for a member of our Support Team to retrieve your manifests from our label suppliers. This is a quick and easy task on our side, providing you let us know the date range for the manifests you require.
If you have any issues or questions in relation to this aspect of the system, please do not hesitate to reach out to us!