I am having problems with two shipments, both originating within the EU. The first, from a well-know UPS battery manufacturer, shipping from Holland. The first problem was that the website would not accept my credit card details, but wanted me to use a bank transfer. Not a good plan. On trying to call them to use my card, I could not get a response from their Helpline, all I got was a cross between "Number Unobtainable" and "Busy". Eventually, I used Online Chat, and got a confirmation that the charge card payment system was indeed down. They are still trying to find out why my 'phone number is blocked. I ordered a battery from them, and saw on the order confirmation that the Postcode for me was missing one digit, so I sent a message with the correct Postcode. This appears to have not been passed to the shipping dept., and the courier says that it has been delivered, to somewhere unknown, and I am still waiting to receive my battery.
In another scenario, yesterday I ordered an SSD, and received a message from DPD that it would be delivered tomorrow, which gave me options to change the delivery details. I filled in the section for what to do if I was not at home, to deliver to a neighbour, and it replied that it had made this the default address for delivery, and listed an address which does not exist in my village. Ho hum.
Is this due to Covid, maybe? That's the usual excuse nowadays.
Well, the item from Holland arrived in the UK speedily, then stopped in Snetterton for days, as TNT could not parse the incomplete Postcode, which had not been updated by the seller. TNT then delivered it somewhere, but we don't know where. I hardly think that is due to Brexit.
The second item is shipping, from stock, wholly within the UK, so again I hardly think that is due to Brexit. The confusion is entirely DPD's fault, not the seller's.
Basically, it's just due to incompetence, at one organisation or the other.
You'd think that couriers and Royal Mail would have a procedure for coping with invalid postcodes. The most obvious is to look up the house number / street part of the address on the Royal Mail database, and correct the postcode. Yes, it's a few extra steps in an otherwise automated process, so there may be a delay while the parcel is taken out of the automated line and handled manually. But I presume the number of invalid postcodes is fairly small, so it's not as if there would be a huge backlog of parcels to be processed manually.
I once had a problem with a parcel that I was sending to a town about 15 miles away, which would have been handled in the Royal Mail sorting office in the nearest city, roughly in between me and the recipient.
I'd been given the wrong postcode - I think two characters had been reversed. I posted it, and received it back the following day (I'd written my address as "sender" on the back). So I wrote "TO" in very large letters on the correct side and "FROM" on the other side. And again it came back again. No explanation - no Royal Mail sticker saying "Cannot deliver due to incorrect postcode". It was my postman who said "I wonder if there's an error in the postcode" and even came back to my house a few minutes later after he'd delivered to the rest of my street to collect the parcel after I'd checked and corrected the postcode.
But sometimes you get some *very* odd mis-deliveries. We once got a Christmas card addressed to our house number and street, but for a town in another part of the country. The postcode matched the address as it had been given (ie it was not ours).
So some sorting process had ignored the postcode and the town, and decided that it knew where there was an Acacia Avenue in the country - but it chose the wrong one.
Mistakes occur, especially with the large volumes of mail before Christmas, but I can't see how that one occurred because it involved someone at the sender's end thinking that they recognised the street name.
We always check delivery addresses very carefully when we are ordering by mail order, because there is a road of our name in our village and also in the town that is a few miles away (it's a common name, equivalent to "High Street"). So we check that the address has correctly recorded our village name. I came across one company which translated our postcode wrongly, omitting the village and listing only the nearest "post town" - which is the one with the duplicate street name.
Normally our address (as translated from the postcode) is of the form
1 Acacia Avenue Village Town Postcode
and
1 Acacia Avenue Town Postcode
is wrong (if someone doesn't check the postcode).
People normally use postcodes, but without the correct village name there is always the chance that someone with local knowledge will assume the postal town.
Some non-UK mail order companies can't cope with the concept of a district (of a town) or a village in an address, and so do not have such a field. In that case I find the best thing is to correct it manually as "1 Acacia Avenue, Village" on one line and town on the next line.
I recently got a letter for someone who has not lived in this property for at least 30 years, if ever. I.e. not known to me and not the people I bought it from...
I still get one every year about an orphaned pension policy that still points at my address. Apparently they are obliged by law to keep sending them until the rightful owner replies. Hell will freeze over first!
I wonder if they eventually stop when their pensioner's age exceeds 120 or just keep on doing it forever?
They are not obliged to accept your order and you will probably find that they will never do so again. I had the same problem in reverse when I lived in Belgium and bought stuff from the UK. One consignment was stolen in transit and they changed their policy to never export again.
I have never seen a sales order system that didn't have a good postcode to houses on the road. My own address causes some trouble since there is no street name at all! I alternate between "No Street", "Main Street" and "Only Street" depending on how I am feeling when forced to choose.
I have only had stuff go missing when it has either been stolen from the van in transit or entrained in a similar shipment sent to another customer. Thank goodness for the photos of where things have been delivered. It had indeed been delivered and signed for that day but it wasn't by me and it wasn't my house on the picture (or anywhere close).
Brexit has made it so hard to export single items that hardly any small suppliers are prepared to do it now. If you want small stuff from the EU you pretty much have to go there in person and buy it yourself.
That makes no sense. They accepted my order, but there was a mistake with the Postcode. I sent them a correction, they failed to update their order information, and gave TNT the wrong Postcode. They accept this. They have now shipped me a replacement battery, why would they refuse to accept a future order from me? It wasn't me that caused the problem.
I agree that either, or both, the Seller and/or TNT should have flagged the error early on, the Postcode they used does not exist. We still don't know where it went to.
Again, this has nothing to do with Brexit, it is an administrative failure. Shipment from Holland to the UK was quick, it is the internal delivery that has failed.
Last month, I was about to place an order for a small electronic item
- weight c 1Kg - from a company based in York. Just before I placed the order, I noticed that they considered me to live in a "remote area", so additional carriage charges would apply.
Back on line, I found the same item from a German company. Slightly cheaper price, including carriage and VAT. Delivery was very quick, via UPS, with full tracking information.
I live less than half a mile from Dundee city centre. Less than four hours by (direct) train from York.
'Remote Area'? Ye gods, maybe they are punishing the Scots for Nicola Sturgeon and her dismal performance. Either that, or just trying to find an excuse to load up the costs to you.
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