topic Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately? in Selling

How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

mcoptimus — Tue, 13 May 2014 07:05:01 GMT

As it stands I am averaging 3 a week over around 80 PB2's sent per week. A few months back I sent 16 PB's out, gave them direct to the local PO to send and none of them got to the customers! I went in and questioned them to only be met with a blank face and a care factor of less than zero. $400 just went down the drain...

As a big majority of my items I sell are very small and light weight I send them in a PB2 and slap a prepaid $1.20 sticker on it. If I register the item I would have to put that extra charge on the item and then it would make my item price above the competition and I wouldn't sell anything. So I'm kinda stuck.

So what do you guys do for sending small items that you litterally can't register because of competition pricing?

Also another question. How tough are you on your customers if AP lose a C & S parcel? The item is worth more than the standard insurance ( even though you state they can pay the extra in your listings T & C's) Do you help the customer out and send another item or tell them tough tittes, buy another.

I am very soft here and will usually send out another item and just try to claim back what I can from AP. I know its not doing my end figures any good but I do it to avoid upsetting the customer and get negative feedback.

Cheers.

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

davewil1964 — Tue, 13 May 2014 09:00:20 GMT

i have had all my sales delivered and have certainly received all my purchases.

i have had a couple of RTSs where the buyer is uncontactable, so I will say none.

Only about 10 sends a week, though.

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

*crikey*mate* — Tue, 13 May 2014 09:12:30 GMT

As a seller, I have only had one where Aus post could be held at fault with certainty.

As a buyer, I had a spate of them maybe 6 or 7? It turned out that there is another street similarly named to mine, and it appears the postie kept getting them mixed up - took a while to work out, but then aus post did take responsibiluity for the lost items that did have tracking,

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

*crikey*mate* — Tue, 13 May 2014 09:16:39 GMT

So what do you guys do for sending small items that you litterally can't register because of competition pricing?

I simply don't sell anything of real value to post this way as every time I post in this way, i know I am risking it not being delivered (or at least a buyer claiming it wasn't delivered)

so the few times that i now do list things of a small value, i hope like craZY for weeks the item gets there and check my messages with great apprehension that a costomer has contacted me saying it's not here, and if they do, I am prepared to offer an immediate refund, as it was a risk i knowingly took.

(I use snmall items with cheap post for free post to help out my DSRs

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

chameleon54 — Tue, 13 May 2014 09:25:34 GMT

The rate of lost mail items does ebb and flow a bit for me, but at a very low rate. It ranges from 0.5 % ( one in 200 ) to 1% ( when I get a little batch go missing ) All of the items that are lost are unregistered. Although tracked items make up 40% of my sent items, I have not lost any of these, so people can draw there own conclusions about this. ( I do think most lost items are genuine ). I just add a small amount to the post cost of all untracked items to cover the occasional lost item and other problems. A bit like self insurance. When one goes missing, I just refund or send another one without worrying about it. Its all just part of doing business on ebay. ( the defect rate thing is a small concern though. Is it fair to hit sellers with a defect because AP lost the item and the seller does the right thing and refunds ? )

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

clarry100 — Tue, 13 May 2014 10:07:09 GMT

We send almost all our items out by large letter. ie no tracking and no seller protection as a result.

We use C&S tracked satchel if a buyer buys multiple items where the total comes up to about $50 or more.

We estimate about 1 in 500 items are reported lost by AP (ie never make it).

We just ask them to validate the address we used first.

Then check with their local PO to see if they are holding it there.

Then if the address is good we simply send out another item.

But our stuff averages about $10 per item, so its simpler and cheaper for us to self insure by replacing lost items. We can't force it to an INR case with PayPal, we would simply lose each and every one.

If we had to resort to sending everything tracked etc to get the seller protection the cost would mean we would never sell anyhting. So not much choice for us as we see it. Possibly means that occasionally we suffer a scamming buyer but meh!!

When we send out another item we put a note against the FB we left for the buyer that simply states that item was lost in transit and we replaced the item on <date>. That way other sellers can see if a buyer is a repeat offender and possible scammer. Once we replace we almost always get a POS for it.

This is how we handle this stuff.

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

phorum_junkie* — Tue, 13 May 2014 12:29:43 GMT

Not one in all the many years I have been selling. Even those who appeared to have gone missing have turned up eventually either with the buyer or returned to me.

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

tonalidesigns — Tue, 13 May 2014 14:14:01 GMT

Maybe one or two every 1000 items that we can't eventually find.

The sort of numbers you are quoting are very high.

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

i-once-was-bump — Tue, 13 May 2014 14:20:57 GMT

I think you should be taking this up with Aus Post because those numbers are shocking.

There is something very wrong somewhere along the processing of your parcels.

Also I would consider contacting the local police depending on how helpful Aus Post are when you contact them.

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

nevillesdaughter — Tue, 13 May 2014 20:40:00 GMT

Over 10 years/6000 parcels sent, I've only ever had 4 go missing. In 2 of those cases I'm fairly sure I was being scammed, 1 parcel was signed for by a thief, and the 4th parcel was unexplained (and it was before I started using tracking and signature on delivery).

I've had a few come back uncollected for various reasons - addresseedid'nt get the card, an error in the address etc but Iam overall very pleases with the Aust Post service,

Your statistics are appalling and I would definitely bestarting some sort of investigation into what is going on.

Good luck,

Marina.

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

photo-video-accessories-pty-ltd-australia — Tue, 13 May 2014 23:10:35 GMT

Just checked my shipping database and it looks like we have shipped around 20,000 items with AusPost and I can only recall 2 that were lost and never found - one was a letter to a RMB and the other a small parcel. We make sure every shipping label is printed the way AusPost wants it - this means we have to correct about 30% of eBay buyer addresses so that they fit the correct format. About 25% of the items we ship are sent without tracking so our loss rate for untracked items is around 1 in 5,000.

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

mcoptimus — Tue, 13 May 2014 23:57:05 GMT

I have found its not the local PO that is stuffing up, it must be at the sorting facility. As I have three PO's close by and have used all of them to with no difference.

I even go to the extent of printing out the labels, and a return label for the back, and taping them instead of hand writing them out. I don't know what the police can do about this as these items are not registered so they would just tell me to take it up with AP.

BTW, I woke this morning, checked my store and guess what?

Another missing parcel!!!!!! Two this week already!!!!

I have spoken with AP on many occassions and they can't tell me anything. Again because they are not registered...

Damned if I do, Damned if I don't I guess.

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

ozstockman — Wed, 14 May 2014 10:26:19 GMT

AP has lost no more than 10 items over 10000 sent in the last four years. About 40% have been sent as large letters and the rest as parcels.

However I am using e-parcel for about 12 months for 99% of parcels. One has been lost even recently though it has been signed for. The buyer has lost a paypal dispute on this one because it has been sent via e-parcel,

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

i-once-was-bump — Wed, 14 May 2014 13:02:59 GMT

I am confused, did you want suggestions or did you just want to tell everyone about the huge number of parcels that have gone missing?

If you think the police won't do anything and you don't seem to want to take it up with AP because you use 3 different POs then you obviously can afford such huge losses.

I think we have all read about the rare AP employee helping themselves to items, in particular those items without tracking but if you feel that is not happening then what do you think is happening?

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

tonalidesigns — Wed, 14 May 2014 14:20:38 GMT

With those sorts of numbers I would be sending everything registered.

What sort of products do you sell?

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

skyautoimport — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 03:03:11 GMT

Guess what, I sent over 250 parcels every month. THis week I have 3 cases which the tracking status said the customers received it but the customers actually hasnt got anything. I have no idea what to do and YES AP lost quite a few of my parcel even i only sent stuff by their parcel bags with tracking. They cost bloody $7.8 to send 500g of stuff which is a rip off already and I need to pay extra for insurance if I need to cover their dodgy job, What is going on??? AP is my only option as my stuff are pretty small but they are **bleep** and EXPENSIVE.

I use their click and send system already so the address is 100% correct but it can still turn out like this. AP is **bleep**

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

chameleon54 — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 04:02:33 GMT

I,ve had two go missing in the past fortnight. One was a buyer who supposedly did not get carded for the parcel waiting collection at the PO, the other I have not got to the bottom of yet. My guess is that a few buyers may have some-one else in the family, pick the item up and forget to tell the other half, a few get stolen from mail boxes or front of house once delivered, a few rare buyers just tell porkies and occasionally I address the item incorrectly. If each of these occur once every thousand parcels, that accounts for 1 in 250 going missing. There may be the occasional untracked item "dissapear" within the AP system. I suspect ( and was unofficially told by AP staff ) that this was an issue around two years ago, but I dont believe this has been a major problem lately. If this ever was an issue, I suspect AP cleaned the problem up when tracking was introduced on all parcels.

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

extra-keen — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 04:20:31 GMT

About 1 or 2 in 500 are reported missing. Most are found or turn up or returned to sender. Maybe 1 in 2000 really goes missing.

I report all missing items to AP in the hope that any missing article patterns will show where problems lie (where the thieves are)...

All in all AP does a pretty good job I think. I send around 50-80 per week at the moment, mostly large letter rate, some C&S, some express.

Just add, over the years Express has been the least reliable service of AP for me.

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

chameleon54 — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 10:09:31 GMT

Around two years ago when I had the chat with AP staff about items "dissapearing" from within the system, they mentioned that AP,s official figure was that between 98% & 99% of mail was delivered. ( From memory I think the exact figure mentioned was 98.3% ) This includes a lot of kids letters addressed to Father Christmas or "grannny, incorrectly addressed mail with no return address etc. My guess is this rate would have improved with the tracking on all parcels.:

Re: How many items have Australia Post lost of your items lately?

davewil1964 — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 10:20:21 GMT

i have had no items lost, inbound or outbound. I have had 2 RTS, but that's it in 5 years. Roughly 40% of my items go as letters with no tracking.