Customer Own System Solution (COSS)

Eligibility

To be eligible to use a COSS solution you must have a Royal Mail business account. Use this link to find out how to open an Online Business Account.

You will need to meet Royal Mail’s requirements for production of manifest and billing information as shown below.

Royal Mail’s requirements

There are specific label design requirements for the different Royal Mail products and you will also be required to produce a despatch manifest to accompany the physical items being despatched.

These requirements are detailed in the specification documents below which can be downloaded from the document library:

• RM COSS Guide V4.0.pdf
• FSpec112 Tracked Standard COSS V2.1.pdf
• FSpec211 Tracked Next Day COSS V1.3.pdf

If using the Royal Mail Tracked® suite of services, you will also need to generate pre-advice files in line with the specification contained in:

• FSpec302 - Royal Mail Tracked Pre-Advice File Spec V2_4.pdf

During the development, Royal Mail will need to test a sample of labels to ensure that they meet the design specifications and to test that the barcodes produced can be scanned using standard Royal Mail handheld devices.

Submission of data to Royal Mail will need to use an AS2, FTPS or SFTP interface protocol. Full specification of interface requirements is contained in:

• FSpec401_Business Integration Gateway 1.4.pdf

Note: Your developer will need to liaise with Royal Mail’s customer solutions team throughout the development cycle to ensure specification requirements are being met.

Document library

Download product information, from application forms to user guides.

All the documents are available to download in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. If you don't already have it you can download the free Acrobat Reader.