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

[mcoptimus]

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.

[twyngwyn]

I have had 4 items this year not turn up....all A4 letter rate & all to Qld 😞

[chameleon54]

The lost item thing may be a bit like the nonpayment issues. It probably affects some sellers more than others depending on the  product they sell and the demographic they sell too. Book buyers must be a very honest and reliable group. I have only ever had one item returned as being innaccuratly addressed, but would expect that I would make the occasional mistake. ( I pick up the odd error in my two part checking process ). It is more common for buyers to simply not bother ( or refuse ) to go to their local post office and pick up a carded parcel. I had one expensive and heavy parcel travel right around the country for three weeks, trying to find a buyer who had not changed his rented house address on ebay when he moved interstate. It went from SA to Qld. ( where it was delivered to ebay order details address for a week ) and back to WA before finally being delivered. Apparently the buyer did have a redirection order on his Qld. mail box, but that is only the recievers name that is different, so all understandable. Kudos to AP for finally delivering that one. I had another occasion when my local red faced AP staff admitted a large letter had fallen from the trolly behind a box in the storage area and sat there for several weeks before it was discovered. On another occasion I witnessed an AP contractor send his reasonably young son ( during school holidays ) to collect the mail from a red box. A gust of wind saw letters blowing up the street. I,m sure there are many reasons why the mail does not always arrive, most of them due to human error.

[clarry100]

Up until the past couple of weeks we rarely had an item go missing. We had been experiencing a loss rate of about 1 in 500 items lost. Our stuff almost all goes by large letter.

But just in the past couple of weeks we have seen a large jump in losses. We have had 5 reported in the past couple of weeks and three of those have been to QLD addresses. We are also in QLD.

One reported just today is about a 10-minute drive from our house. The buyer could have requested local pickup and we would have been happy to take off postage too.

So it seems something has changed inside AP in recent times to drive up this loss rate.

With sales being way down and loss rates up (among other things) it really makes us wonder if/not we should continue to trade.

Since our stuff is all untracked we have to replace lost items too.

[i-love-my-sheep]

I had one item addressed to me that was returned to sender - not at this address. I had bought off that seller multiple times, yet it was still returned to him in England. He took a photo of the address on the box and sent it to me and it was correct. He resent it before I could tell him to cancel the order because it now means that he has lost money on that item by resending it. There is a similar sounding street in my town and occasionally I get their mail and they get mine and we usually deliver each others mail (which reminds me, his house insurance renewal turned up here on Friday, I must drop it around). I believe that if my parcel had gone to the other address, he would've delivered it.

I had a buyer in Germany contact me last week to say his items haven't arrived and I asked him to let me know if they hadn't arrived by Monday (yesterday). I haven't heard from him, so hopefully they have finally been delivered. I suspect I will get a message in the next few days because I suspect his items may've been intercepted by customs in Germany. 

Apart from that, I've had nothing go missing or not arrive. Most of my items are sent large letter $1.40 postage, so are untracked. Some do take a LOOOOONG time to arrive, like average 3 weeks from rural NSW to WA, but they get there eventually.

[wehavethatau]

All my items have "TO" written clearly on the front and "FROM" on the back. 

I post approx 300-500 items a day and lately am getting 2 or so items daily get delivered to me instead of the buyer.

Really annoying.

[vibe.city]

Some of you sellers are very lucky not having Australia Post lose or misdeliver your non-trackable items!   They lose my items regularly!

Like the original poster, most of my items are low-value and it would be impossible to sell them if I only used trackable post.  (I ALWAYS give trackable options but I can't even recall the last time a customer chose to pay for registered post.)

The vast majority of my items are sent in standard size (DL) envelopes.

Australia Post lose at least 2 of my items every single week.  (I send out at least 200 items every week - usually more.)  All of my labels are printed correctly and I always have a return address stamped on the back of all envelopes. 

There was a current affairs show last year (Today Tonight or A Current Affair - it was definitely one of the two) that told how Australia Post loses 3% of ALL mail.  I was not at all surprised when I saw the show!  But I'm a little confused how so many sellers in this thread say Australia Post never loses any of their stuff.  This is highly unusual in my experience.  (Very lucky though!)

I also constantly get incorrectly addressed mail in my letterbox at my home, my investment property and my PO box!   And I mean at least weekly.  I can categorically state that my personal experience is that Australia Post loses things all the time, they misdeliver all the time, they charge too much for their **bleep**py service and I can't wait until there is a real competitor for them out there. 

I have also had items posted to me (the sender) rather than the addressee!  They are reading the tiny little return label on the back of the envelope as the address label! 

I seriously think Australia Post needs to up it's game in EVERY regard.  And it needs to start with the people who deliver the mail.  Unfortunately, it seems that more and more of them can't even spell their own name, let alone read an address correctly...

[clarry100]

Yeah we live in a townhouse complex and its very common to get mail for another unit in our box. Fortunately its quite simple for us to then place it into the correct box number.

When we moved here we paid the $60 for AP to redirect our mail for 12-months to the new address. We subsequently found out that two important mail tax relevant items still went to the old address.

[i-love-my-sheep]

I will risk getting shot down here for this comment and probably labelled, but people who emigrate here don't always speak or read English very well and despite this, they are still managing to get jobs that require a good knowlege of both the written and spoken language. That is very true in the health system, I can't see why it would be any different in the mail system, especially in the city areas. I was reading the 'naughty nurses' page the other day and it was surprising how many foreign nurses have lost their registration in Australia because they couldn't pass a basic English test. These tests were performed AFTER they had made a monumental blunder and nearly cost someone their life, because they had either given the wrong medication or given the wrong dose of the correct medication, or in one case, gave the patient dishwashing liquid instead of the prescribed tablets, because they couldn't understand the order that was written or the instructions on the bottle or even what was written on the bottle. While working in the mail system isn't going to cause the demise of someone if their grasp of the English language isn't that good, it can still cause an increase of delayed delivery or misdelivery, where it's sent to the wrong address or sent back to the sender by mistake. I could be completely wrong, but I would say to a degree, there's probably an element of truth to it.

[fragy64]

Two of my parcels have not arrived within weeks of one and another, Aus post are useless, the parcel travels around the world no problems, gets to Redbank Queensland then vanished into thin air, tracking number available and they still can’t find where it went, rubbish post service

[davewil1964]

I doubt your situation is the one applying SIX years ago.

There are many more current threads about delivery in COVID times. Maybe you should read some of them.

In 'Buying', not 'Selling'.