Somebody please, for the love of god, fix shipping/couriers
1. Sign-up process is convoluted. This should be so simple. Are you a business or a person? What are your billing details and contact details? Done. Don't give me a Merchant ID or make me telephone you. Don't make me put in address information: you can have that when I send something.
2. Believe it or not, I do not know how heavy my item is or its exact dimensions. I threw away the packaging. I don't have a set of bathroom scales because I'm not a teenage girl. Charge me a premium for not knowing. I don't give a shit. Just don't force me to enter the dimensions of something which I might not have in front of me or schlep it to the scales at my friends' house so that you can calculate how much diesel you need to be putting in your vans. You're coming to my place to pick it up. Why the fuck can't you just do this yourself? Or how about you plug into a product database that knows how heavy stuff is? While we're on the subject: do you have any idea how offensive the idea of printing something is to me? An actual, honest to god physical piece of paper? Why? And then what do I do? Attach it to the box with glue? String? Tape? Fucking hell, you guys go around picking up parcels all day, can't you just do this yourself with special stickers? Charge me a few bucks for it.
3. Don't give me a 25-digit code to track my parcel. That's what, a hundred quadrillion potential shipments? Enough for every single person in the world to send 14 million parcels each with significant room to breathe. Make it very simple for me to get to the parcel I want to track. I can track by consignment or reference number with TNT, but it's not clear which one is provided by a shipper in some cases. Don't you dare fucking say "Consignment number not recognised" when I put the reference number into the consignment number box. Do it for me. You know TNT recycle these numbers? If you log in to their odious website with a tracking number you had to decipher from the wall of text they send you, you sometimes see that your package has been delivered! To someone called Ben! Who lives in Scotland! Oh, no, wait, their crummy service has 25 digit non-unique tracking numbers. Makes perfect sense.
4. Make it useful for me to track my parcel. "Your package is being processed in our network" is a message I've seen a few times. Tip: any time you put a code or a status number into the human-facing message for parcel tracking, you've fucked up. If something is going to DELAY or SPEED UP the arrival of my parcel, that's all I care about. If you're not going to provide me with a useful window to receive my parcel or send it (i.e. a one hour window) then you should tell me where your van is with GPS. Fuck the security concerns; put RFID on your parcels and secure your vans with that futuristic stuff banks use (I think it's a combination of paint, sensors and BIG SCARY WARNING SIGNS). Just don't treat me, the guy who pays for your courier service, like a criminal who can't be trusted to know where his parcel is, just because someone might take a chance that someone is using the same van to ship Faberge eggs in my area and roll it.
5. Don't make me sit at home for an entire day waiting for my parcel. Give me a specific window when you're going to deliver it and try to be there on time. If you're late leaving or there's a mechanical problem or traffic or roadworks or inclement weather, update me. Estimating time is hard. I get that. It's not so hard that you have to identify "Between 9am - 1pm" as your four hour window. Today (May 14) I tried to use Parcel Force for the first time, having exhausted all other options in previous attempts to ship things. They said they'd pick up my parcel betwen 14:00 and 16:30. I arrived home from work at 13:40 to find that they'd been and dropped a note through the door saying "Sorry we missed you." The note was labeled to say that he'd tried to collect the parcel at 14:00, t...
132 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] thread• I've never had to call someone.
• I've used flat-rate boxes where I don't need to measure out my stuff.
• When pricing things out, the only thing I have to choose is generally whether I want insurance and roughly how soon I'd like it to arrive.
• I've never had to print something out. Generally I write in sharpie or print the address info and the clerk adds their own good looking sticker right before I pay.
• I have picked up stuff from my local depot. A few times...? Confused on this point too.
I'll agree with you on
• The time slots for packages to arrive are annoying if you don't accept packages being left at your door. This is also true about plumbers, cable techs, phone people, etc.
Is it a difference between business and residential customers?
> I've never had to call someone.
This is a broadly applicable CS issue which everyone in the startup world would do well to remember: time dilates when you're waiting. Customers waiting in a store to speak to an assistant disproportionately overestimate the amount of time they've been waiting (i.e. a 2 minute wait feels like 10 minutes).
I call to chase them CONSTANTLY. Today for example, I called to say that the guy had come early. They took my details and said they'd get him to come back. At 4pm, a couple hours after I'd spoken to them, I called again. "Oh yeah the driver didn't answer my message. I was going to call you." Every courier I have ever used has made me fight them to give them my money and get my item shipped.
> I've used flat-rate boxes where I don't need to measure out my stuff.
You can get those from a post office in the UK, but I'd rather they just let me pay extra for the guy to box it himself. That way you can kiss goodbye damaged during/before shipping disputes, too.
> I've never had to print something out.
It's the default option for a whole bunch of couriers in the UK.
> I have picked up stuff from my local depot. A few times...?
Royal Mail will allow you to. So will any couriers who use them instead of having their own depot. Big couriers will not allow you to collect your item from their despatch centre, you have to arrange for redelivery.
If you have 40 people queueing outside you deport every saturday to pick up stuff you didn't deliver, then you're not doing it right.
I feel you pain. Perhaps it's better in the states, but here in the UK it's a fourth rate service.
Does anyone in line go home empty handed because the depot closed before they got serviced? If not, then it sounds as though the depot has optimized for the minimum number of employees to get the job done during the window, without worrying about the variable queue length.
At the end of the day, most people triage on price, and these companies are not irrational about that.
I'd say the right way to do it would be to have full day opening hours on a saturday. The variable length of the queue on different days provides some great insight that's currently being ignored.
The classic example - I'm single, work during normal business hours and as a freelancer I am reluctant to take high-value time off work to collect low-value items from couriers who do not honour their delivery slots. It's basically impossible for me to receive parcels from most courier firms.
The problem is that the people paying the courier firms are not generally the people feeling this pain.
You're right that it's broken for individuals in the main. I'm in the office 10 hours a day: if I get items shipped to me there, or picked up from me there, that means schlepping it all the way to the office / from the office. So I was pleased to be able to choose a two hour window at which to be at home. Of course the guy turned up half an hour early. It makes perfect sense.
My friend had the best quote on this: "All courier services make normal people seem like Larry David-level assholes."
Obviously you can't do that from your home, but you probably don't have all the tools to do a lot of stuff at your home and you have to go somewhere for it. Plus, if you are going to/from work in the first place, it seems like a pretty trivial thing to do. Stop off to drop a package off, or if their website says you have a package, pick it up.
Sometimes I wish I could order a delivery to some local outlet (like FedEx has these Kinko stores)
When the box arrives there, they give me a call, let me know it's waiting, and that I have 5 days to come pick it up.
Yea.. I do have to drive to pick it up, but at least I'm not at the mercy of the driver's schedule. Once it's there, I can get it when it's convenient for me.
- Billy Bragg, Help Save The Youth Of America
(if Europe is burning, everywhere is burning - where to get out to?)
${coffeeshop} gets a customer incentivized to get a customer loyalty card and who may well want to grab a hot beverage while they're looking over their new purchase. Plus whatever deal they figure out with the delivery company.
[Edit:] I like the suggestion in one of the comments above for Ocado (or presumably one of the other home-delivery supermarkets) to tackle this problem. That would seem to be an even better fit - companies who expect to deliver to the home out of business hours and who are far better at honouring their timeslots. Of course for these customers the recipient is the customer - which probably explains the radical difference in service.
has a link "Search for a Locker"
Also, the second section opens with:
Amazon Lockers are currently located in Seattle, New York, and London. If you live in Seattle or New York, you can search and select a locker location during the checkout process or in Your Account by following these steps below.
I'm not sure what your complaint is.
If you still don't understand, try reading the link.
I'm not complaining, I'm just unable (at present) to do this. Even if I could search for a locker I still wouldn't be able to use one without the option on checkout. When/if Amazon roll this out further it will be delightful.
"If you read the page", "If you still don't understand". I did, I do. Please note HN policies on politeness.
You replied with a blatantly untrue statement proven wrong by the very post you replied to. A link to search for drop points is right there. Do not tell me to coddle to someone who willfully posts incorrect information out of laziness or carelessness.
Especially when I was giving you exactly what you were looking for. It just doesn't happen to be in your part of your country at the moment which apparently is enough for you to come whine about it.
The receiver wants all the best tracking/delivery/notification options possible. The receiver might not always explicitly state that they want the cheapest, but they will often factor it in. Often the shipper wants the place that's closest to them who is cheapest.
Its not dissimilar to the airline system. Everyone ranks things that they want better of on flights (service, seats, legroom, meals, nice planes, etc) but (nearly) everyone searches by first price and then by rough schedule, often rewarding the cheapest. I hate US Air, but if it comes to a flight that's on US Air which is $100 cheaper than one on something else... I unfortunately often choose US Air.
1. Thats pretty much all airlines (can/do) differentiate on. The mainframes running pretty much all the ticket/seat allocation worldwide are sooo old they only handle pricing. And no-one can fix them because everyone plugs into it.
2. Actually thats all we really do care about.
(2, is less true. I am going to be taking my kids on a long flight soon. I would pay extra for an on board creche / nanny. But there is no way of putting that flag on any flight search so no point in offering it.)
This is a perfect example of how technology encourages a flight to the bottom. You have US air. Why? Maybe they only use lemon scented paper napkins. You would like to search for flights that never use lemon scented paper napkins, but you cannot, so there is no way to tell if spending 100 dollars more will make you happy so why bother?
And maybe its only worth 50 dollars to you not to get lemon scented ...
Gone are the days of in-flight martinis, flying being a somewhat classy experience, and anything resembling comfort.
At this point, maybe its not even worth the airlines trying, as the TSA degrades the experience at the door.
I mean you can conceive of solutions:
* Why does the luggage not get treated like container transport. Load up cages next to check in desks for the same destination.
* Take back control over your booking. There is absolutely no need for any airline to not take bookings direct. Want to sell through your partners - fine but they come to your API/site to actually book it. Then everyone has real time info. Think that will drive your prices down? No, don't sell at loss making prices.
I could go on. I am having a hell just trying to find somewhere nice and sunny to take 2 children. There is just so many options and so little information to trust.
But this problems exists for every service - hair cutting, selling houses and airlines. One and only one URI is really selling an actual seat or an actual house or an actual chair with a hair dresser.
So one and only one URI should publish what is available.
And then aggregation and search is simple(ish)
It seems to me that the next evolution of the search engine is to tell the people selling stuff that they don't need to do SEO, or marketing. They just need to use a standard micro data / format for whatever they are selling.
A long time ago I worked for an ISP that gave 1MB of personal disk space free to everyone. We bumped to to 10 then 100 when we realised no one actually used it.
This failure to put our own stuff online is the cause of huge problems - real estate agents, facebook, AOL, every walled garden, every agent, all stem from people and businesses not publishing their own needs.
Must stop ranting now
Why it's more expensive to purchase direct, I don't understand.
This is why hotel sites will offer discounted prices based either on prepayment, or package deals, so that the price isn't directly comparable to Expedia, etc. It's also why those deals are sometimes the best - with sites like Expedia/Travelocity taking something like 30-40% of the nightly rate (versus a much lower % for airline tickets), hotels should be willing to bend over backwards to get you to book directly.
Also, it's possible to put a hold on a ticket without buying it; I'm guessing here, but if you're looking at one system the available fares list might reflect that some seats are on hold (by not showing those fares), while another system might not, resulting in different fares being visible... that will generally show up as a difference in the lowest-priced fare, since most of the search sites highlight that parameter when displaying search results.
I'm also scratching my head as to why we're now ~3 (maybe 4 counting ITA?) levels deep for purchasing of airline tickets? Hipmunk -> Orbitz -> ITA -> Airline
That seems to be the sign of a broken system.
There is a lot of "slack" in how travel is priced due to all kinds of agreements about what rates you're allowed to show. That's partly why package deals can be so good. These are not simple problems to solve, even in a best-case scenario.
If you look into all of the issues surrounding the United and Continental merger, there some fascinating material exists on airline reservation systems and back-ends. In summary, I think they get build to defense contractor standards, which does little to reassure me.
The non-advanced version surely wouldn't cost more than $20 to sell, and this (small) cost is pushed to the end users, in return for which they get convenient and secure deliveries when they're not at home.
The more plausible approach would be to run a store-front with convenient hours near residential areas to make up for people being unable to have, say, a large or expensive item shipped to their home while they're at work.
This store-front could have a secure 24x7 vestibule with lockers of various sizes/shapes to accommodate most general packages, each locked with a combination emailed to the recipient. (or perhaps a central unit would allow a credit card to be swiped, or NFC device read to unlock the appropriate box.)
Very large or awkward packages could be kept behind the counter. Staffing this from, say, 8 to 8 wouldn't be terribly expensive and it's a service you could easily charge another dollar or so for. To say nothing of additional shipping charges you could capture, from having real human beings available to help people ship things.
You would, essentially, be re-inventing a US post office with better hours and on-demand PO Boxes of interesting dimensions.
http://mashable.com/2011/09/06/amazon-locker-system/
http://www.mobile-apps-news.com/bricks-vs-clicks-shoprunner-...
Each time hardware would arrive, it would be physically tortured - once a huge dent in the bottom of the frame (did they drop it repeatedly on a guardrail out on the freeway?), once broken IN HALF!
Sending was equally fun. A large multiprocessor cabinet was to go overnight. Pickup time: the guy brought a van too short. He simply dumped it over on its side and slid it in (despite THIS END UP stickers all over). Off to the terminal!
Didn't see it for a week. They had no idea whatsoever where it went. Turns out the guy was late to the airport, so just dumped it into a truck going somewhere. A truck on an odyssey of discovery apparently, finally turned up a week later in Tennessee.
I have never used a service as bad or as useless as UPS. It boggles my mind that they even exist.
I just have things shipped to my work address if I care about the item [esp. things like electronics, which can be damaged when the delivery guy throws^Wdelivers :) them.].
It would be possible, although insanely difficult, for someone to disrupt the courier market.
The box which I mention in my OP, which was due to be picked up between 14:00 and 16:00 GMT (still sat in my hallway now at 17:30 GMT, despite being "guaranteed" to get to Scotland by 12:00 noon tomorrow) is costing me £30 to ship. I'd have paid double that to someone who makes my life _simpler_.
Now looking at my third phone call to the courier in question just to find out what they've accomplished during the last two hours of radio silence in pursuit of operation "Get a man in a van to pick up his phone then go to an address on his route".
I know a few people who would happily dance on their grave if another company were to put them out of business.
My first thought was a shipping window that narrows as it gets closer. I.e. On Monday you can predict arrival on "Friday" with 95% confidence. At Friday 11am you might be able to predict arrival at Friday 11:30 - 11:45 with 95% confidence.
Also, is it possible to apply a technical fix to the social problem of the driver writing an incorrect time on a slip? I.e. insist on it being a printed slip? It's probably more common that they send the slip without making a serious effort to ring the doorbell and deliver.
Both of the big-name companies here (UPS & FedEx) give phone numbers on their tracking systems that you can call when they are unable to deliver a package, but a) nobody is actually notified of the failed delivery, so you have to know that a package is coming in and actively watch the tracking page to catch the failed deliveries, and b) the people you talk to at that number are either incapable of or unwilling to make any kind of permanent note in their system that can fix chronically failing addresses.
For several years we put up with about 80-90% of our packages failing delivery (moreso from UPS than FedEx, but both were pretty abysmal) due to "incorrect or incomplete address," being forced to notice this on the tracking system on our own, then calling to tell them that no, the address is not incorrect, the street itself is misnamed and yes we've called to explain this dozens of times in the past and can you please put some kind of permanent note in your system to ensure this doesn't happen anymore.
A couple years ago, after another failed delivery from UPS, I decided to try a new tactic and looked for public UPS twitter accounts that I could tweet in the hopes of bringing it into a more public sphere. I found @MikeAtUPS and tweeted him that another delivery had failed, it happens a lot, and nobody at UPS seems to be taking the situation seriously. He directed me I think to a corporate support email, which I followed up on, including links to the tweet and response. Amazingly, this actually worked. They responded immediately with an apologetic email, said they had made a correction in their system (though, I'd heard that one before), and that this shouldn't happen again.
And it didn't! After that, UPS stopped failing our deliveries (with the very odd exception). FedEx slowly started to get better over time as the drivers started to learn the area better, and also stopped being an issue. So maybe the lesson is, skip the outsourced help desk numbers and go public with your grievances if you want to be taken seriously.
As an aside, USPS has not once ever failed to deliver a package or even drop one off later than the expected delivery time. If it's an option, I will always choose them over the private courier services 100% of the time.
Definition of a court:
an open space enclosed wholly or partly by buildings or circumscribed by a single building
In other words - a cul-de-sac.
Lane: a strip of roadway for a single line of vehicles
So, your community must be full of braindead idiots who never went to school to learn what words mean.
FedEx never really got the whole rural concept. Even with the names, they still have so many problems.
I also live in the country and both UPS and FedEx deliver to me regularly. Even on overnight deliveries, I can leave a signed note to the driver that it's OK to leave the package if no one is home. Often if there is no one home and it's raining, the driver will try the doors on any vehicle outside (we have multiple cars/trucks) and put the package on the driver's seat.
The logistics industry (in the UK at least) is in utter turmoil. I have about 10k ecommerce merchants using our platform and I hear these points on a daily basis.
Speaking to a few logistics and delivery providers recently they tell me the cost of delivering this service has tripled in the past three years. However this hasn't been passed onto the merchant / customer, this industry is living in an artificial bubble and I predict its going to pop. The truth is the price has gone down as companies such as Yodell have arrived to disrupt the space with rock bottom prices (and rock bottom service), this puts huge pressure onto the other providers who are dropping services at a rate of knots.
Its not an easy thing to fix, especially as there are so many interconnected services and companies.
Even Amazon currently just says "can't ship to this address" at the very end of checkout. What am I supposed to do at this point of web interface - quickly move to another country and then input the new address?
My FedEx guy used to have a cell phone he'd use to call me (on fedex packages from Amazon, they print the delivery phone number) as he was coming around to my place to make sure I was ready and not on the john or something. It was great. Then FedEx thought good service was too expensive and removed their phones, causing me to miss half my packages because I had headphones on or something.
I then moved to an apartment building with an intercom system. Every time I got a delivery it'd first fail with "we don't have the PIN code for your building". Every time I'd have to call them and tell them to use the intercom to call my apartment.
I've seen some good solutions though:
- In Sweden, the regular postal system shut down all their post offices and started offering their services instead through local supermarkets, convenience stores, gas stations etc. So what happens when you get a package mailed to you is that you get a SMS message or a paper slip in your mailbox with a code, and then you go to the store it was sent to to pick it up (for me it's always been the supermarket I go to daily to shop anyway, at most a 5 minute walk). The bonus of not being in a dedicated post office is the hours of supermarkets are far far better than the post offices ever were.
- In Japan, the domestic courier services let you pick a date and 2/3-hour window for delivery in advance. I've never had them miss the window. If you miss a delivery, you can reschedule it online, often to the very next delivery window on the same day. You can sign up online to get "missed delivery"/etc notifications by email.
I hate Wal-Mart a lot more then the delivery services.
What about Wal-Mart is it that leads you to believe they'd do badly at being a post office?
Why is this? Do they do this more often for residential addresses? Are they incentivised monetarily to power through as many "deliveries" as possible in a day, and residential deliveries take up too much time?
I don't understand it, it seems a failsafe way to get a recipient to enter rage mode to drop off one of those cards when they've done something like taken the day off to receive the item.
Also I think it's fairly normal to require an address when you sign up--you usually sign up if you want to order something.
It's the shippers who are at fault. I have used TNT (through Apple Store Online); FedEx (my choice), UPS (my choice), DHL (my choice) and today Parcel Force (again my choice) to ship things.
The best one was UPS. They couldn't get their heads around the fact that I wanted to ship something from my parents' place to my new place. "So can you just tell me what the dimensions of the TV are?" "I told you. It's not here in front of me. I don't know. It's about a 30" screen." "What's the depth?" I DON'T KNOW OR CARE. Normal people do not know these things. Make me pay £5 extra for each piece of information I don't know. Just pick it up and take it to where I want it.
Of course, there are companies that do everything you indicate you want. But if you don't know who those companies are, you clearly can't afford them. Alternatively, you can use the USPS, which does almost everything you describe above except #5.
Useful tracking needn't be expensive. The delivery driver knows when he's heading to my house. Even just telling me his lat/long at the point when he leaves the delivery prior to mine in a text message would allow me to usefully calculate where my parcel is.
> #2 would necessitate an incredible amount of arbitrage (i.e., increase prices even further) because it would severely impact their ability to maximize parcels shipped.
I'm fine with that. Like I said elsewhere, this is costing me £30 to send. I'd have happily spent £100 to get it done fuss-free.
> #5 is available from both UPS and FedEx...for additional cost (on the recipient).
Again, fine with additional cost. I've used it from UPS before and it didn't work.
> If you really want #9, then you may end up with $100/parcel pricing.
I'm more than happy to pay it.
> Of course, there are companies that do everything you indicate you want. But if you don't know who those companies are, you clearly can't afford them.
Yes, you're right, I'm not wealthy enough to be able to afford a hassle-free shipping experience. I know of plenty of companies who will bike a parcel to anywhere in the UK for me directly for an amount I could afford. I could speak directly to the driver and have him call the recipient when he arrives. That's not the point.
The point is that it takes 90 minutes to fly to Scotland from London. It would cost me about £80 return.
I've been sitting at home for 5 hours waiting for this package to be picked up. It is costing me £30 to send.
It cannot be the case that we live in a world where it is genuinely more convenient for me to fly by plane for three hours in order to give someone a box than to have a professional courier do it for me.
> I'm fine with that. Like I said elsewhere, this is costing me £30 to send. I'd have happily spent £100 to get it done fuss-free.
It's not enough that you want to pay £100... there have to be enough customers willing to pay £100 to balance out the loss of customers who would pay £30 (as well as the decrease in unit volume that would result), and there probably aren't.
Most people don't want to pay the $6 or so for UPS shipping... Paying $200 would restrict your customers to a very small part of the market shipping very high-value goods (jewelry, bearer bonds?)... I wonder if even armored car shipping is that expensive on a per-item basis.
I disagree. Trite comparison, but: "Most people don't want to pay the $999 for a Pentium PC… paying $1999 would restrict your customers to a very small part of the computer market." If you offer the quality I bet it's possible to make a really profitable business out of it. Think how many times these items are important: heck, I just wanted my TV so I could play Battlefield 3, but I'd have paid more than I did to get it sent to me. How much would people pay to not have a crummy experience with a courier if they used a courier a couple of times in a year?
Not suggesting I know the answers, but I think it's an interesting area for innovation.
Consider this: for $50, you could probably get someone who lives on your street to sit around all day waiting on your behalf for your package to arrive.