[Closed] Do online retailers expect to have parcels "go missing"

It's a shame that they've decided that zero contract staff doing minimal pay multi drop with the occasional "lost package" is still cheaper than full time staff in a living wage and less "shrinkage".

They'll get a few if they do decent volume. I expect the offer of provision of all the details probably cemented it for them. They may also have had a number of reports from same route I'd guess.

Happened round here when a substitute driver for one of the delivery companies got given a round and a heap of parcels in the area were marked delivered when they were not. In our case they all turned up next day with the regular guy. I guess in our case someone wanted to hit a target / grab the per drop payment without actually doing the work.

All this stuff is tracked to the nth degree and they’ll likely know whether it was pilfered.

I did some agency driving for a plumbing supply company and there was a note up in the canteen explaining someone had been sacked as stuff had been ‘going missing’ but they quickly tied it back to the driver.

Even agency vans are tracked via the delivery app on the drivers phones etc.

I have a small online business - typically 1% of stuff goes missing/broken. Mostly using Royal Mail.

I expect the amount of pilfering from Amazon is significant judging by the number of piles of their empty boxes I've found in remote hedgerows. I usually take a photo of the labels and send them to Amazon.

We lose about 1% too - Royal Mail primarily. Rarely lose anything with FedEx, but if it does get lost it’s almost always when being processed at a sorting facility in Montana.

Royal Mail have been particularly useless this year - much more so than any other operator.

JP

I once had to report a missing parcel (phone) to the police because their gps said they had been in the area and that they had delivered to number 5. Number 5 were in holiday. And they refused to refund without police contact. I now have a £50 limit on ordering anything on Amazon.

They then emailed me accusing me of fraud, but went silent when I asked how many parcels actually delivered to my address had gone missing.

I chased up something I'd ordered in the middle of December which was still showing 'notified' on Royal Mail tracking a week later:

I had an immediate response from the shop (an engineering supplier): "Looks like another one that has been 'mis laid' by Royal Mail - we have had over 200 parcels go missing over the last 5 weeks"

Having moved house a month before Christmas we've received an exceptional number of deliveries of late, like several a day for weeks. I work from home so have been in to accept them. Thanks to 'rona I'd estimate that I've seen a driver on maybe two thirds - three quarters of the deliveries, the rest have been left on the doorstep with no other evidence that anyone had ever been. I would be astonished if the number of non-deliveries wasn't higher than 1%.

But... what do you expect them to do, especially in current circumstances? Launch a national manhunt to try and track down your girlfriend's new slippers, distinctive and unique as they are in a brown cardboard box? They'll just shrug and either write off the value or claim it from wherever it was insured.

we have had over 200 parcels go missing over the last 5 weeks”

Is that a big number? It's astonishingly bad if they've sent out 205 parcels in total but if they've sent out 200,000 then a 0.1% failure is a pretty good hit rate. In isolation "200" is tabloid levels of meaninglessness.

Never any bother with Royal Mail, Hermes is the courier of notoriety where we live. Every day there's someone has things that have been 'delivered', usually with a photo of someone else's porch or front door.

Last post says it all really, it's not the service provider but the employee who's responsible. We've had a lot of stuff go missing this year, all before it ever gets near our local delivery lads, whether that's Royal Mail or private couriers. Most bike related, presumably with obvious signs of the contents on the packaging.

As above, Hermes never fail to disappoint, tracking is a joke , says in system weeks after item should have been delivered so no claim entertained , what a shower. TBF Royal Mail lads are always helpful at our local depots.

We have to redeliver about 1% of all magazines every issue due to nondelivery.

I had a strange experience, ordered a 2021 'health and fitness' diary, same one that I had in 2020, liked the layout. Anyway, new one comes, layout completely different, hated it, so tried to return it to Amazon. Was marked as something along the lines of 'no return needed refund' i.e. they refunded my £6.99 on the spot and didn't want the item back - cant get my head around it other than they just cant be bothered with receiving small items and reselling them ... bizarre

I’ve only a few times has to deal with Amazon for issue with items I’ve ordered or not. Only had one missing parcel no questions asked was reposted, a couple of broken items new sent out never asked for a return and few Christmases ago my youngest kept ordering Elf to watch they fully refunded them all.

They’re massive company taking a hit on a missing item rather than a lost customer is probably priority plus they’ll likely have insurance.

Never any bother with Royal Mail, Hermes is the courier of notoriety where we live.

Our experience round here too. Hermes had some new/extra drivers covering our area at the beginning of December and the village "Spotted" FB group became a swap shop every evening.

Was marked as something along the lines of ‘no return needed refund’ i.e. they refunded my £6.99 on the spot and didn’t want the item back – cant get my head around it other than they just cant be bothered with receiving small items and reselling them … bizarre
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it would cost them more money to get it back, restock it and resell it than they would make.

physical shops budget for ‘shrinkage’, I guess this is the online equivalent.

Royal Mail have never lost a Hebtroco parcel ever. We only use Signed For.
Been a bit slow lately but still 100% hit rate on around 10,000 shipments this year.

As a family that get 5-6 parcels a week, I'm astonished that we have never not received one. Possibly because we buy a lot of tat, could be a factor....

(Quite a few are obviously bike related so not tat)

Also worth remembering that the online sellers can re-charge losses back to the couriers. So Amazon’s immediate, no quibble refund to you, is simply deducted from the amount Amazon pays to the courier at the end of the month.

The clauses vary, and rather depend on the size of a contract and the power of the contracting parties. So little old me trying to get a similar deal with Fedex would unlikely succeed, but Amazon contracting with Accrington Stanley Parcels likely would.

It’s just a cost of doing business as jambo says. But the big online players manage to shift some of the cost. Imagine bricks and mortar retailers being able to charge the cost of shrink back to the shopping centres they operate from?! 😉

I had a strange experience, ordered a 2021 ‘health and fitness’ diary, same one that I had in 2020, liked the layout. Anyway, new one comes, layout completely different, hated it, so tried to return it to Amazon. Was marked as something along the lines of ‘no return needed refund’ i.e. they refunded my £6.99 on the spot and didn’t want the item back – cant get my head around it other than they just cant be bothered with receiving small items and reselling them … bizarre

Part of the problem with returns is  customers expect the goods they buy to be new. If your diary arrive film wrapped and you've had to unwrap it to see that the layout doesn't appeal to you - to another customer that might subsequently receive it thats  no longer 'new'. Its not what they expect to see when they open their parcel, they'll feel fobbed off and the seller's reputation (which is based on feedback)  suffers. For the seller time spent checking returns are complete, undamaged, that you haven't drawn knobs key dates etc for an item thats worth £6.99 minus the £3.99 return postage isn't worth it

Pointing out something pretty obvious on the 27th of Dec 2020 too... dairies have a limited shelf life

With returns of any value thats a problem - higher value electronic stuff seems shop-soiled if its not got every seal and bit of peal-off film intact. Anything of that nature that gets returned tends to go to auction.

If you buy clothes on a 'buy two sizes, keep the one that fits and return the other' basis - with many retailers that returned garment just gets chucked. The seller can't afford the risk of sending out clothes to a customer who then discovers evidence they've been worn by someone else.

But in bricks and mortar retailing you have the same wastage. People buy the book or magazine behind the one at the front of the shelf that has been thumbed through. Nobody would want to buy the display model of a TV / computer / Hifi that has had all its buttons jabbed by kids sticky fingers and so on.

Lots of Boots Christmas presents found there way into a local feild/layby last week must of been 30 empty smashed up boxes dumped.
Im sure the loss/recovery percentage would seem high to the customer but the retailers nail it down to the penny. the huge retailers just claim it back from the main delivery companys anyway

for an item thats worth £6.99 minus the £3.99 return postage isn’t worth it

... for an item that's sold at £6.99 but is only worth to Amazon whatever they paid for it which is likely half what you did. So now you've got your £3.99 return postage for a sub-£3.99 value package, even assuming they could resell it at full price without any further handling / repackaging overheads they're still now actually losing money over having you toss it in the bin.

I had it with a laundry basket the other day. The box was all smashed up but bizarrely had been repaired, so I can only assume the damaged happened before it'd even left the seller's warehouse. The basket itself was, of course, very badly broken.* I complained, they asked for photos, then gave me a full refund and told me to dispose of it at my convenience.

(* - I suppose actually it was very well broken. Isn't language strange?)

On a similar note, I got a SUP for Christmas, ordered from Bluefin via Amazon by Mrs Demille. She then got a message apologising for non delivery and was offered a many hundred pound refund! She’s too honest to do so but can’t figure who would stump for that loss.

Back in the dark ages when I worked in retail anything returned could not legally be resold as new. It therefore has to be discounted in some way. I often wonder on places like Amazon this is what the stuff listed as used actually is

I often wonder on places like Amazon this is what the stuff listed as used actually is

They have their "warehouse" or something similar for flogging returned stuff.
I know the Royal Mail had an investigation department which used to analyse the customer service reports and if they found a pattern of "lost" deliveries could then send fake parcels and the like to try and catch them.
On the customer side of things. Amazon has been known to occasionally ban users for too many returns.

This year's obviously been a big one for it- noncontact delivery is wide open to it, no signatures etc, more items left on doorsteps. And many many more parcels to deliver in the first place, which means more new and more overstressed and more pissed off drivers.

I do all my stuff (about 500 items a year) by hermes and for sure they're worse just now than before. Not just from losing things but also their customer services just can't keep up, every response is slow and also rushed.

Thing is, there'll always be at least some parcels lost or stolen or damaged, that's inevitable. So they all decide on how much is tolerable, and cost effective. But sometimes those decisions will get kicked up in the air by external factors.

On the customer side of things. Amazon has been known to occasionally ban users for too many returns.

[Citation needed]

robvalentine
Full Member
I once had to report a missing parcel (phone) to the police because their gps said they had been in the area and that they had delivered to number 5. Number 5 were in holiday. And they refused to refund without police contact. I now have a £50 limit on ordering anything on Amazon.

They then emailed me accusing me of fraud, but went silent when I asked how many parcels actually delivered to my address had gone missing.

This is what I was expecting from Amazon.

But again I can not really fault the service they provide. RC car for sons xmas, axle snapped. Took pictures but couldn't find anywhere to add them to the return section. Was expecting an interrogation about how it broke and how aggressively it had been used. Few hours after dropping off at collection shop we had a full refund.

Ebuyer.com though.........
Bought Hard drive for PC build on the 15th December, paid extra for next day delivery. Failed to be detected so had use the backup in my PC. Return was painless enough with collection by courier but replacement drive received on Saturday (9th)