A merchant encountered collection issues when using Royal Mail labels purchased through Shopify. The Royal Mail driver refused to collect parcels due to the absence of a manifest.
Attempted Solutions:
Downloaded Shopify’s shipping manifests app (incompatible with UK)
Contacted support, who only suggested dropping parcels at the post office
Root Cause Identified:
A respondent clarified this is a widespread Royal Mail system issue affecting manifest generation across all platforms (business accounts, Click and Drop, apps), not specific to Shopify labels.
Current Workaround:
Parcels must be dropped at the depot rather than collected.
Status:
The issue remains unresolved, with another merchant expressing similar concerns about adopting Shopify’s Royal Mail labels for their business.
Summarized with AI on October 23.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
Help! We’ve just started using the Royal Mail Shopify labels, as they’re about half what we pay RM directly. However, we ran into an issue where the driver won’t take the goods when he calls to collect as there’s no manifest.
I’ve read all the help articles, download the shipping manifests app (only to find out it doesn’t work for the UK!), and been onto support who simply advised “drop the parcels at the post office”.
This seems crazy to me that no one else would have encountered a problem with their collections when using the Shopify RM labels - they’re so cheap, using them isn’t an option but surely there must be a way of generating a manifest so the items can be collected?
Royal mail (and parcel force) are having real issues with collection manifests, it’s very much a them problem right now, it doesn’t matter if you have a business account, use click n drop or their APP, a good percentage don’t make it through their collection system.
It’s a pain, but they will accept them at the depot.
I wonder whether you managed to get anywhere with this as we would like to use Royal Mail labels through Shopify as well and are worried that they will not be collected with the rest of our mail.
We had a few days where the driver refused to accept the goods, this meant we had to drop them to the local post office. They accepted them with no issues, but it was a pain! About a week later, the driver said he would start taking them - we assume he was told from somewhere higher up the chain that they had to accept them.
Our biggest bug bear now is that the order number doesn’t print on the label, I have raised this with Shopify, but think more merchants need to do so before they will do anything about it.
