I sell second-hand DVDs on eBay, which I post as letters for either $1.40 or $2.10 depending on weight.
Last Saturday, I sold 32 DVDs, 28 of which paid by Sunday afternoon. Hoping that the DVDs would get into mail sorting early, I posted all 28 on Sunday afternoon in my local AusPost red box.
I have used the local red box for almost 4 years now, and have never had an issue. Stuff that I post there on Sunday afternoons tends to arrive at interstate metro locations by the following Tuesday, and interstate non-metro locations by the following Wednesday. A fairly good turnover, given that I am posting the DVDs from Perth.
What concerns me is that NONE of the 28 DVDs that I posted on Sunday have appeared to have reached their destination yet, and it is now Friday morning. While I haven't actually contacted any of my buyers to check whether or not their DVDs have arrived, I usually receive feedback for at least 20% of my sales by the following Wednesday, and as mentioned, it is now Friday. I have also had one buyer just contact me to let me know that it hasn't arrived.
I'm not quite sure what the logical next step is from here. From my own experience as a buyer, I hate being harrassed for feedback, however, I am thinking about carefully selecting a few buyers and contacting them either tonight or tomorrow morning to ask whether they have received their DVDs yet (would that be too soon?). If all reports are negative, my plan is to then contact the rest of the buyers and explain the situation and that I will be speaking to Australia Post on Monday.
Of course, I don't expect Australia Post to be particularly helpful since none of the letters were sent registered, but maybe they could tell me if there was some incident with the mail on Sunday.
The weird thing is, I know that it is not a problem with the red box itself. I posted a DVD there on Monday afternoon, and it arrived at the interstate buyer's location by Wednesday evening.
All signs would seem to indicate that Sunday's mail was lost, or misplaced, or stolen, or I-don't-know-what.
To cut to the chase, what I am wondering if whether anybody else has experienced a similar issue to this. Have you ever had an entire lot of mail posted in a red box simply vanish in the mailing system? Has such mail ever shown up later?
Either way, it looks like I might fall victim to the defect system sooner than I expected. If I get defect for refunding ever single one of those 28 transaction, I will be well over my 5% defect rate, on the path to never being allowed to sell again on this ID that I have carefully built up 1000s of feedback on over almost 10 years.
Advice? Thoughts? Comments? My apologies in advance for the extreme length of this message. It's good to vent.
