If you're processing more than 30 orders a day through Royal Mail Click & Drop, you already know the pain. You export your orders, print the A4 sheets, and then spend hours manually matching items, highlighting SKUs, and trying not to mix up orders with similar names.
It's tedious, error-prone, and scales terribly as your business grows.
In this guide, we'll break down how to optimise your Royal Mail Click & Drop sorting process so you can cut dispatch times by up to 80% without hiring more warehouse staff.
The Problem with Manual Click & Drop Sorting
When you connect Shopify, Etsy, or eBay to Click & Drop, Royal Mail handles the postage brilliantly. But what it doesn't do is help you physically pack the boxes.
The default Click & Drop picking lists are basic. They list orders sequentially. This means your packers end up walking back and forth across the warehouse for every single order, picking items one by one.
This leads to three major bottlenecks:
- Inefficient Routing: Walking the same aisle 15 times a day.
- Duplicate Orders: Missing that a customer placed two separate orders, meaning you pay for postage twice instead of merging them.
- Picking Errors: Grabbing the wrong colour or size because the default printouts are hard to skim quickly.
The Solution: Batch Sorting and Pick Lists
To solve this, you need to move from order-based picking to batch picking.
Step 1: Generate a Consolidated Pick List
Instead of taking 100 order sheets and looking for the items, you need a single master list that says:
- 15x Blue T-Shirts (Size M)
- 8x Red Mugs
- 12x Phone Cases
Your picker goes to the warehouse, collects exactly these totals in one trip, and brings them to the packing bench.
Step 2: Sort by Item Category, Not Customer Name
Once the items are at the packing bench, you need to sort your dispatch labels by what the customer ordered. If you group all the "Blue T-Shirt" orders together, packing becomes an assembly line. You can blast through 15 identical orders in minutes rather than constantly switching contexts.
Step 3: Automate the Sorting (The Secret Weapon)
This is where ShipKnot changes the game.
Rather than manually copying and pasting your Click & Drop orders into Excel to create a pivot table (which takes 20 minutes every morning), ShipKnot automates the entire process in one click.
ShipKnot is a Chrome extension that lives right inside your Click & Drop dashboard. When you're ready to dispatch, you just click a button. ShipKnot instantly reads your active orders and generates a beautiful, PDF pick list that:
- Totals up all identical SKUs
- Groups orders logically
- Flags duplicate customer addresses so you can merge them
It requires zero server setup, doesn't need API access to your store, and runs 100% locally in your browser for maximum security.
Best Practices for the Packing Bench
Once your orders are sorted efficiently, ensure your physical setup matches your digital workflow:
- The "U-Shape" Bench: Set up your packing materials in a U-shape around the packer. Boxes on the left, tape and inserts in the middle, dispatch pile on the right.
- Pre-assembly: Pre-build your most common box sizes during quiet periods.
- Double Check: Always have the picker count the items at the bench before packing begins. If the master pick list said 15 Blue T-Shirts and they only have 14, catch the error before you start putting labels on boxes.
Conclusion
Stop letting Royal Mail Click & Drop dictate your warehouse workflow. By moving to batch picking and using automated tools like ShipKnot to handle the sorting logic, you can process hundreds of orders with zero stress and zero errors.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Click & Drop generate picking lists automatically? Yes, but they are very basic and order-by-order, not consolidated. For a true consolidated pick list (e.g. "Pick 15 of Item X"), you need third-party software like ShipKnot.
How do I stop sending duplicate parcels to the same customer? Click & Drop doesn't always flag when a customer has placed two separate orders across different platforms (e.g. one on Etsy, one on Shopify). Using a sorting tool to merge orders by address before printing labels will save you duplicate postage costs.
Is ShipKnot safe to use with my customer data? Yes. ShipKnot is a 100% local Chrome extension. It reads the data directly from your browser screen and generates the PDF locally. No customer data is ever sent to external servers.