Small business owners said they have 'suffered financially' due to lost or damaged packages sent via Royal Mail
Stephen Deacon, 39, from Scarborough, set up his hand-made gnome company during lockdown
A small business owner says he has lost out on £1,000 after claiming more than 30 of his home-made gnomes were lost in the post by Royal Mail.
Stephen Deacon, who set up a football-themed gnome and ornament company during lockdown, said his business is being “impacted financially” by the losses.
The 39-year-old from Scarborough said he has sent out more than 15,000 orders since setting up El Loco Gnome, but 31 orders have been lost in the last year, totalling nearly £1,000.
He described the losses as a “complete failure by Royal Mail”, adding it appeared parcels were “just disappearing causing extra stress, damaging my reputation and costing my business”.
Mr Deacon claimed requests for compensation on two of the first orders to go missing were denied by Royal Mail so he filed a complaint with management.
However, he has been unable to get his money back so far, leaving him “totally aghast”.
i understands some of the items have been handled by a third-party logistics and Royal Mail is still investigating what happened.
Other small business owners have told i they have suffered financially due to lost or damaged packages sent via Royal Mail.
It comes as Royal Mail lost a record number of letters and parcels in the last year, with nearly 900,000 complaints made about the issue, according to Ofcom’s annual post monitoring report.
Damaged post has also reached record highs with nearly 90,000 complaints in 2022-23, the report showed.
Some customers who use Royal Mail for their business choose to absorb the replacement cost themselves rather than going through the compensation process.
Andy McVeigh, who runs a football-inspired art business called Burley Banksy, has had problems with his prints getting damaged in the post, costing around £300 overall.
The 52-year-old small business owner, from Leeds, said: “It’s a minority of my my products, but the damage to prints and the damage to frames has been quite regular.
“My prints sell for £20 so it’s not devastating, but then you have to send another print to the customer. And then you have to pay for the postage again, and the packing again.
“That’s been reasonably regular. A lot more regular over time.”
He recently launched a successful compensation claim when a large print sent via Parcelforce was “smashed to smithereens” in the post.
However, he often chooses to foot the bill himself for smaller orders rather than going through the claims process, totalling costs of around £300 since setting up the business in 2020.
It is understood some of Mr Deacon’s items were handled by a third-party logistics company and Royal Mail is investigating whether it received the items in order to be able to deliver them.
A spokesperson from Royal Mail said: “We deliver more than a billion parcels every year with the vast majority delivered successfully. We encourage any customer who experiences a loss to contact us directly and we will investigate.
“In this case (Mr Deacon), we are engaging with the customer and their third-party logistics company, who is responsible for delivering products from the customer to us, to establish the root causes of these reported losses. The evidence shows the majority of the items did not arrive within our network.”