> > We are very lucky in the UK in this regard. Our contract > would be with the retailer to provide shipping, as we pay > them, not the shipper. If you pay for X-day delivery, it > arrives in X days or you get your money back from the > retailer. I've done this more than once. Any decent > retailer would notice a trend and do something about it. >
I have given up on online stores which use UPS (or indeed anything other than Royal Mail or ParcelForce) because they're all so crap at delivering stuff. The trouble is, when you order you don't generally know who they will use to fail to deliver the stuff. When they use someone like UPS the company cannot deliver to me because I'm at work. I have no intention of having stuff delivered at work either. So they take the stuff back to the depot. They don't deliver on Saturdays or Sundays, so I can't rearrange the delivery for then. They take it back to the depot which is generally a very, very long way away and only open in the morning on a Saturday. I'm damned if I'm travelling halfway across London to collect the stuff during the small amount of spare time I have, and why would I use mail order if I have to go further to collect than I would if I bought from a bricks & mortar shop? If they fail to deliver I tell them not to try again because it's futile, a waste of time, money and petrol, and damaging to the environment. But they ignore that and try again. So I cancel the order and tell the online retailer why I've cancelled it, pointing out that it's bad customer service. But I suspect they ignore this, or don't get enough cancellations to make them change. My guess is that it's cheaper to use UPS etc. than Royal Mail. But they lose repeat business. I've bought hundreds of books from Amazon because they get it right. There are other online retailers I would use repeatedly if they could get their deliveries right. But they don't, so their cheapskate approach costs them. I will pay extra if I know a company uses Royal Mail because I know I will get the delivery. One of the reasons Amazon do well is that they've got this right. They use Royal Mail, which usually has local delivery depots so people can to them quite easily on a Saturday morning. Recently Amazon have started an even better service where they leave the stuff at my nearest Post Office rather than the depot, so I have even less far to travel. This is a company which seems to think through the whole 'customer experience' from end to end, and this is why they have grown so big so fast. Cheers, Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
