Portaltech Reply helps Royal Mail achieve millions of satisfied customers using its online postage service

Today’s postal marketplace is a highly competitive one and there is a constant need to keep up with evolving technologies and online services. Combined with requests from online retailers and C2C businesses looking to provide their customers with simple and easy integrated shipping solutions, Royal Mail saw the need to take the humble stamp online and build a web based postage service.

The Brief

Lockheed Martin has a strategic partnership with the Royal Mail Group to modernize and automate its entire delivery network. An essential aspect of which is the incorporation of eprocurement and efulfillment into the overall delivery network.

With a million items of postage every day in the UK, the Royal Mail Group needed a platform and system that could cope with a large number of transactions. The greatest challenge facing the project was to aggregate a number of existing, disparate systems, which would provide a single interface that third party businesses could “plug into”.

Royal Mail Group came to Portaltech Reply because it wanted:

• A scalable and flexible system which could cope with the large number of transactions daily
• An application whereby Royal Mail customers could purchase and print stamps through Royal Mail’s online customer portal website
• A supporting website service that could be accessed directly by third party companies. This service is vital for the growth of Royal Mail in responding to the demand from its customers to offer an integrated postage solution into third party websites.

The Solution

Portaltech Reply managed to produce a result that meant that the revenue generated through eBay / Royal Mail integration outstripped the existing Royal Mail site, opening up a business strategy to develop more third party relationships.

The project, delivered on time and to budget was very in-depth. The service offered by the system was scalable at all levels to handle the high potential volume loads.

The project included:

• Integrating various systems in order to provide all functions required to generate an online stamp, from image generation and billing through to tracking and fraud prevention
• The design of a web service interface to expose all relevant functions required by the online stamp process and with which any third party could communicate
• The design, development and integration of a web application within the portal environment which provided a compelling customer experience and interface with the web service

"Portaltech Reply have been great partners for us over the past three years and have brought a wealth of knowledge to our consumer projects. We regard them very highly." Dennis Greene, Head of eBusiness, Royal Mail Group.