Shipping bike from UK

Brendan Hennessy

Hi all,

Anyone notice a huge increase in the cost of getting bike shipped from UK (e.g. £50 previously, now £150)? Better still, can anybody recommend a reasonably priced courier?

Cheers, Brendan

hesker

Brendan,

Did you find a more reasonable cost for shipping a bike from UK to Irl.

Cheers

Edit: I’m probably going to try Parcel Motel

Brendan Hennessy

Definitely Parcel Wizard for me.

You pay the internal UK carriage to vendor and you need to have €3.95 in your PW account and hey presto you have a bike at your door and money in your bank account!!

Bren

hesker wrote: »

Brendan,

Did you find a more reasonable cost for shipping a bike from UK to Irl.

Cheers

Edit: I’m probably going to try Parcel Motel

Weepsie

Parcel motel will definitely be more expensive I'd say.

I had a box that was mm outside the limit so they charged double and I had to collect

hesker

Brendan Hennessy wrote: »

Definitely Parcel Wizard for me.

You pay the internal UK carriage to vendor and you need to have €3.95 in your PW account and hey presto you have a bike at your door and money in your bank account!!

Bren

Deleted

hesker

Weepsie wrote: »

Parcel motel will definitely be more expensive I'd say.

I had a box that was mm outside the limit so they charged double and I had to collect

Can you say what the dimensions were because that doesn’t make sense based on my playing around with their shipping calculator. I can see how prices increase alright but for a box that is for example 150 x 80 x 25 the charge is about €42.

Or is their shipping calculator a pile of dung

hesker

Had a look at Parcel Wizard FAQ. They have a similar oversize charging structure to PM.

A 150 x 80 x 25 cm box comes in at €32 for the Irish leg. Bit cheaper than PM at €42

For bigger boxes the difference is substantial

180 x 100 x 30
PW €65
PM €98

Big difference though when you consider insurance.

PW is limited to €100

PM offer €1500 cover for 14 days at a cost of €10.50

Weepsie

I've had wheels and some other massive box sent to me from pw for just the normal charge.

Might have just been lucky

MrMojoRisin'

I had a bike shipped via parcel motel from merlin cycles this month. The parcel size was 27 x 102 x 82 cm, for which they charged me 28€

Getting it delivered to my house then was another 7.50.

hesker

MrMojoRisin' wrote: »

I had a bike shipped via parcel motel from merlin cycles this month. The parcel size was 27 x 102 x 82 cm, for which they charged me 28€

Getting it delivered to my house then was another 7.50.

What size bike was that may I ask. Seems pretty small.

MrMojoRisin'

58cm large. Its a steel bike too so not the lightest. I didn't measure the box when I got it, I copied those numbers from the email parcelmotel sent me when they charged me the 28 euros. The front wheel was alongside the frame inside the box, it wasn't on the fork

njburke

I have a bike on its way from spa cycles near leads, £40 is what the courtier fee is for delivery to ireland.

hesker

njburke wrote: »

I have a bike on its way from spa cycles near leads, £40 is what the courtier fee is for delivery to ireland.

Do you know what courier they use. Shop might have a discounted rate but I wouldn't mind checking it out.

hesker

Just updating this thread on what I went with in the end.

I had agreed to buy a bike from a seller. They really didn't want to send to Parcel Motel and no assurances or explanations from me really made a difference. Out of interest they said cheapest price they could get to post from UK mainland to PM was £72.

Box they insisted on using was 150 x 25 x 80 cm.

Cheapest direct shipping I could find was with UPS which came in at £118 with insurance cover of £2000.

In the end the seller bailed as I suspected he would so wasn't too surprised or dissappointed.



On to seller 2 who I ended up buying from.

Bike was packaged in a box measuring 133 x 20 x 74cm. Both wheels removed and packed in wheel bags inside the box.

Cost with UPS would have been £102 direct again with insurance cover of £2000.

Seller was happy to use Parcel Motel. Charged me £30 shipping. He tried to use Shiply but in the end went with Parcel Force. From their website cost is calculated as £34 mainland to PM NI. Insured cost would have been £118 so I expect they skipped the insurance.

I paid the €10.50 for PM insurance cover of €1500. PM cost to deliver was €21.

So total cost to me was approx €65. But one leg of that was I suspect not insured.

So if I was doing it again I might be tempted to go with UPS as it would be insured all the way and would cost about €110.

The big variable in this is the size of the bike box. It can be hard asking a seller to pack in a smaller box if they have a bigger one at hand.

seanin4711

seen a TT frame on FB marketplace
got seller to box it up.
added 30 gbp for cost of collection of courier from mainland UK to NI.

Courier to PW in norn iron!
Parcel wizard to Galway home delivery


best €3.75 i ever spent!