I've been buying odd things from eBay sellers for years, and nearly always things work as they should. But last week two separate purchases failed for utterly bizarre reasons.
I bought toner for my laser printer and as it would be too big to go through our letter-box and I thought I might be out for the delivery, had it delivered to the paper shop near us that we often use and which was a listed collection point. It was delivered by Hermes earlier than expected. But the shop said I needed a code to collect it. The code never arrived, nor the text message I expected. I wonder it was Hermes fault - I see that they have just changed their name. Perhaps Royal Mail would have been better?
I sent in total 5 email messages to the seller's various addresses, but never managed to get a valid code. My parcel sat on the shelf of the paper-shop for nearly a week until the proprietor got fed up and handed it over anyway - but he said that they risked having their 'paypoint' terminal being taken away if they did this sort of thing, so he asked me never to use them as a collection point again.
A couple of days later I bought from another seller a couple of face masks which did fit through our letter-box, but one had a detached ear-loop, so I started the returns process. They sent me an address label and it posted the item back. A few days later it came back to us again - the online Royal Mail tracker said "addressee refused to accept the package" while the red Royal Mail label on my returned envelope had a box ticked saying - addressee no longer at this address. Both assertions appear to be false. Perhaps Hermes would have been better? :-) I've now got a refund for this, so no great problem.
I suppose it's just bad luck - anyone else had things go wrong in unpredictable ways?
Different problem to what you describe but my wife bought a one handed small rechargeable chainsaw for trimming small branches in the garden. The drive to the chain slipped as soon as the teeth touched the work so it was useless. She contacted the seller and requested her money back. The seller suggested giving her a discount of about 6 pounds. She refused and repeated her request for full refund so they upped the discount to 10 pounds which was also unacceptable. Finally they suggested sending her another unit. She accepted with the proviso it must work satisfactorily and she's currently waiting for the replacement to appear. Why they thought a discount would be ok when the unit was simply not working beats me.?
My brother (lives the other end of the country) has just bought one from Toolstation with the same problem. Any tips welcome. I don't do chain saws anyway. ;-)
I had bad experiences of using the parcel-collection process of Asda. Parcels would be delivered there but staff often had great difficulty finding mine or else could not operate the terminal which validated the code which I had been sent by Amazon.
On one occasion the Asda staff spent about 15 minutes trying the process several times, rebooting the terminal and getting a colleague to check that they were typing in my code successfully, and then decided that they were not authorised to hand it over, though they accepted that I had a valid code, clearly on an email from Amazon. So that parcel had to be returned to Amazon and I had to get a replacement. Amazon tried to charge me the full price for the replacement, rather than the discounted price for the one that I'd originally ordered, until I pointed out that they email "your package has been dispatched" and the delivery of the package (which I saw with my own eyes in Asda) constituted a contract to supply at the price agreed.
I wrote to Amazon and to Asda detailing the problems that I'd had on that occasion and on the previous occasions, and suggested that Amazon and/or Asda should improve the training and the technical quality of the code-validation terminal, and that Amazon might review Asda's contract to act as a collection service.
I then went over to using a newly-opened locker service at another supermarket in town, which worked fine apart from two problems: once when the courier was unable to find a vacant locker and so had to return the package, and once when the code refused to open the locker. That latter case was like something out of a 1970s sitcom: there is no mobile coverage inside the supermarket building or for about 100 yards outside it, and the lockers were inside. So I had to go outside, phone Amazon help, wait for instructions, ring off, go inside to try what they'd suggested, come outside, phone, get more instructions, rinse and repeat. The biggest problem was an Amazon one: they could not relate my various phone calls by my order code, so each time I had to explain to a different employee everything that their colleagues had previously suggested.
But those experiences are rare. Normally the delivery to a post office or to a locker works perfectly. Now that my wife is working from home (her employer has continued the work-from-home Covid arrangements) there is normally at least one of us at home, and our postman and our Hermes courier both know where to leave parcels safely (ie not inside a dustbin on bin-collection day!!!) if we are out. Couriers have a thankless job and work under great pressures of time, but they almost always get it right. With one exception - a company that I won't name which lobbed an expensive electronic device about 10 feet from the drive onto our doormat, and was proved to have done so because there was fresh snow on the ground and his footprints showed where he'd lobbed it from. And on another occasion the courier got out of his van, walked up to the door, then turned round and walked back to his van, logging this as "customer not at home" even though I'd watched him do this and opened the door as he was walking back to his van - I called out but he looked straight at me and got back into his van. Those incidents were reported to Amazon (as well as to the courier company) because Amazon need to know about the antics of the companies that they are paying to deliver packages, just as the courier bosses need to know what their staff are doing.
Covid has led to couriers being more amenable to leaving packages on doorsteps (with a photo as proof of delivery) though they rarely say *where* they have left it: on our village's Facebook page there are postings every few weeks from people who say "does anyone recognise this front door or this signature, because the package is marked as 'delivered' but *I* haven't received it". Where a courier genuinely believes he has delivered to the right house (but has got the wrong house) you can understand them thinking that a photo is sufficient, but when they *know* they have delivered to the wrong house (a neighbour's), why can't they ask for the neighbour's name or house number? I had a parcel go astray and had to go along the street to find out who'd taken delivery of it, because the signature was an illegible scrawl (*) which I couldn't relate to the person's name even after I know who it had been delivered to.
(*) A vague squiggle with no visible shapes of letters: I didn't have a
That may be the mark of a dropshipper: they find a route into the postal system somehow - either a container at Heathrow, somebody living above a Chinese restaurant, or a quirk of the tariffs that means it's cheaper to post things from the Solomon Islands than it is from elsewhere.
They have to provide a UK address for returns, but they don't want to pay for the costs of handling the returns. So they simply pick a random address, or rent a Regus office for a month and then cancel it, and use that as the returns address. That office gets bombarded by returns parcels, but it fulfills the requirements of ebay/amazon/etc that a returns address exists. When a return is organised, possibly the tracking saying the item was collected is good enough to keep ebay happy with the seller, irrespective of what actually happens to the parcel. This way they don't have to pay landfill for their junky returned products.
One of my mother-in-law's favourite expressions was "these things always happen in threes". While this is readily dismissed as "daft old folk-law" one thing that I know as a some-time statistician is that "Random events cluster".
I've only had a small number of issues in thousands of eBay transactions and cumulative losses can only be a few tenths of a percent which I regard as very acceptable.
The only item that I never got by mail order was a bicycle - present for grandson. It seemed to vanish in the local distribution depot. Can't remember the carrier - it was about 10 years ago.
My wife ordered an electric bike a few years ago. Once it had been customised, the shop sent it out by courier. The bike didn't arrive, so she phoned the shop. They had sent out two bikes that day - could the unthinkable have happened? It turned out that both bikes had been delivered to the other person, and his elderly father, suffering from mild dementia, had signed for both without realising that there was anything wrong.
The courier had to sort it out, arranging collection from the other chap, and did so commendably quickly. It was definitely the courier's fault: my wife's bike (once she received it) was labelled with our address not the other person's, but the courier hadn't looked at both bikes and determined that they were to go to *different* addresses.
Clive Page snipped-for-privacy@page2.eu wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net:
The code you needed is the eCP (ebay Collection Point - code) and it is shown on the order details accessible from your purchase history so it is accessible to you.
It is not uncommon for inexperienced sellers to omit this from the delivery address causing the problem you describe.
If you recover the eCP from your order details and when tracking shows it as delivered take a printout of the order details to the shop with robust ID and see if they will link the eCP to the parcel which should result in a collection code being made available to you. You may need to return home to receive this by email.
For smaller stores I'd say you have a 75% chance of success in this procedure. A polite and reasoned approach works wonders of course so try to maintain your cool.
Hermes are appalling in my area and I wouldn't dream of receiving anything from them at home. Click & collect has its problems too but it's difficult for a courier to claim that they couldn't get a reply from a long hours newsagent. Ebay has a dedicated team for click & collect problems if you can work your way through the contact menus to access them.
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