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.

[photo-video-accessories-pty-ltd-australia]

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.

[mcoptimus]

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.

[ozstockman]

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,

[i-once-was-bump]

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? 

[tonalidesigns]

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

What sort of products do you sell? 

[skyautoimport]

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**

[chameleon54]

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.

[extra-keen]

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.

[chameleon54]

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.:

[davewil1964]

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.