Royal Mail versus the little person: Up for the challenge!

[Chrissy]

Some of you may have read my thread about a bottle of ink that I sold on ebay and mailed to my buyer in the US.

What you may not know is that this ink bottle sale was not the first one that gave me cause for concern. My previous inky sale was to an ebayer in Belgium who bought two bottles of ink from me. Because we're both in the EU, no customs labels are required, so I packed both bottles and happily mailed them off to Belgium.

The tracking suddenly showed me that the parcel was being sent to DGRC in the UK. I wasn't sure what that was, so had to spend ages on the phone waiting for Royal Mail to tell me that the parcel had been flagged as containing "Dangerous Goods" and was being returned to the Royal Mail Dangerous Goods Returns Centre.

I thought this description was a tad harsh for a couple of bottles of ink, so I emailed the Royal Mail CEO to ask about it. She said she was very sorry it had happened and she would get someone to look into it.

Anyway, long story short, the person operating the scanner had "recognised" these bottles as perfume bottles, so stuck a special warning label on the box confirming they were perfumes and were prohibited from being mailed outside of the UK. Eventually, I received the parcel back and the CEO's office paid me some compensation.

Meanwhile, "The Writing Desk" was very helpful and sent me details of labels they attach to ink packages, and the bottles were sent again and only took 3 days to get to Belgium.

Subsequently though I received a standard letter from Dangerous Goods telling me that "all inks were prohibited in Belgium" and referring me to the Royal Mail web-site Countries list for Prohibited and Restricted Goods. Sure enough there is a line confirming that tannins and their derivatives...inks. are on the prohibited items list for Belgium, France and the Netherlands.

I thought this surely had to be a mistake, so I tried to contact someone from the Royal Mail partner carrier in Belgium, BPost, to ask if they were happy to carry water-based fountain pen inks. Eventually, I received a reply and we had a short email chat that ended with them saying there was no problem with BPost carrying these inks.

I mailed my guy back in the Royal Mail CEO's office, and sent him this email thread, suggesting that the Royal Mail web-site was wrong to have inks on the prohibited items list for Belgium France and the Netherlands.

After quite a while, he's come back to me and confirmed that the Royal Mail web-site will be changed to reflect that inks aren't on the prohibited items list.

So our friends in Belgium, France and the Netherlands, you can now buy inks and fill your fountain pens.