Are there any guidelines how to deal with the situation when the package has a tracking number and according to a mail carrier it has been delivered, but the customer says he didn’t receive anything? Who is responsible for the loss?
1 Like
It’s a tough call, but in those cases, we say it is not the sellers problem. If there is a tracking code & it has been verified delivered, you’ve done your part (as far as I’m concerned…).
It happened to me once that the neighbour or the local post office had kept it.
I say its totally your call. Go with your gut. If your can afford to ship another and absorb the cost then it could certainly make for a lifetime customer. If you go the other way and deny to resend another item then you may lose a customer and unfortunately other sellers on tindie may also suffer. However, only you know what your margins are and whether or not you can absorb it.
If I resent I would make sure the customer knows it’s a one time generous offer and you won’t be making a habit of it.
We have constant problems with my local post office; they regularly screw up delivery along our street (on multiple occasions the carrier has delivered everything one house off; who knew off-by-one errors were a USPS issue too?) and several times have marked things delivered that simply were not. In one case it showed up almost a month later - a month after they marked it delivered - and in another it seems to have never showed up. Maybe week 40 will surprise me.
Personally if every vendor on Tindie offered an insurance shipping option I’d take it for anything over $10-20. USPS is simply too unreliable AND their tracking lacks any decent granularity. As a buyer I feel like sellers out to take some level of responsibility for the shipping method they choose; I would have been willing to absorb some of the cost of a resend in my case, but I feel like I did everything I was supposed to do - why should I be the person taking 100% of the financial hit?
Perhaps if Tindie offered the possibility to let the customer choose multiple carriers?
As far as USPS is concerned the package was delivered. They don’t even care if it is not delivered. I was sending something internationally with tracking and the tracking worked until it left the US, but the package was never delivered. I went to the USPS and they told me they did their job and can’t do anything about it.
I just received a mail that was supposed to go to the house next door.
I just has one of these last week too. It was an international package that did offer tracking to the front door of a business address in the other country. It shows delivered on Sunday. Being a business, I agree with the customer’s assessment that there was nobody there to receive it on a Sunday, so something wasn’t right about that. I went ahead and shipped a replacement package at my cost and I’m currently waiting to see if it arrives. Overall, less than 1% of my shipments fall into this category, so I’m not terribly concerned when I have to resend something as it is made up in the profits of all the successfully delivered packages.
I had another one in December that was domestic US shipping that took three weeks to arrive. My replacement shipping arrived the same day as the delayed one. The customer paid me for the replacement since he had received both, eventually. We figure it got caught up in the Christmas shipping with high volumes.
-John
Oooh shipping insurance. I like that idea. I’d be happy to charge another few dollars for insurance to make it a no hassle process. I’ve found that the USPS insurance is a pain to deal with. We’ve only had two domestic flat rate boxes go missing and it was just a time sink to get any money back. I’d much rather charge my own few bucks so I can just ship another without even thinking about it.
For my international orders, I now use Shipping With Insurance, that’s the only option customers can choose because I had too much lost and resend packet on my own. Good practice but so much cost.
So from France it’s about 8$, since using it, never had a packet lost, and if it’s the case I win money because insurance is higher than price send 
But I agree postal services are really a pain !!!
I have had an Amazon box miss-delivered. Amazon was good about replacing the order. They said if it turns up to keep it.
Sure enough a neighbor brought the item around a week later It was delivered to the same address on another street.
As a usps mail carrier I would like to say that our scanners are GPS tracked so anything we scan will show on a map exactly where we scan parcels. Be it front door, mailbox etc. by which carrier and the time. So when you call and complain supervisors will see exactly where it was delivered.
But… you might consider is finished, but in most cases when this occurs and you tell the seller to take a long run off a short pier, their next port of call is to go and talk to the delivery company, and 99.9999% of the time they roll out the stock answer which is : We can only discuss the matter with our customer and as the recipient you are not our customer, we advise you discuss the matter with then sender…
And as the customer has already been told to sod off by the sender then next thing to do is to talk to pay-pal, and they usually just follow the party line and try to say “our records show it has been delivered” we advise you to talk to the retailer…
And this is where the lets tell the customer to talk to the other party and the merry go round starts again.
And in this instance I dont contact any party again, I have all the emails telling me to go blow and my next port of call is my card issuer and the words “charge back” I have found as soon as the party who arranged the transaction get the funds swiped back from them, suddenly they contact me and want to “reach an amicable solution” this is where I tell them to take a long run off a short pier…
So anyone trying to say “they have done their part” deserves all they bring upon themselves, as that is BAD customer service.
A situation that can happen to each of us. Great discussion, thanks for sharing! 