Courier problem avoider but could have been so bad. I decided to flip that B&O stereo system that I repaired recently and put it on eBay at a bargain price, priced it to go (on 2nd thoughts I did price it way too low) but it was in for £160 and the buyer offered £140 and after some haggling agreed £150. Now this was some big arsed chunk of stereo equipment that also had a delicate sliding glass door on the front, so demanded some serious protection for the shipping.
I had to remove the door and also the carry handle which also housed the active FM aerial and wrapped them up in such a way to afford them with the maximum protection for the journey along with the main body, so that meant a lot of bubble wraps around each item, all in a large strong tri-wall cardboard box with bucket loads of packing materials in-between each item and the outer wall of the box, so the box was pretty big. I sent it via Hermes using the Parcel2GO service and purchased their 2 to 3 service, paid for guaranteed delivery by the 4th May (a bit of a con really considering the expected delivery date with the service I paid for was 29th April, but of course you don't find out the guaranteed date is far later than the target date, until you accept it).
As it turned that was a pretty wise choice to insure it for the full amount. The 29th came, and the tracking still showed it was in transit. At the end of the 29th, tracking showed it was the local dept, but there was going to be a slight delay in delivery. On the 30th, that message was gone, and it was back in transit. Over the course of the following days and the weekend it made its way to the national sorting hub and sat for there for days including the 4th of May.
The buy was getting concerned and rightly so, but we were in contact with each other during this period, and on the 4th I contacted the booking agent, after going through all of their automated options and failing to find a way of speaking to a human
. I noticed that they had a Twitter account, so I used that to message them. They set up a trace on the parcel via Hermes and discovered that they had lost it, and asked me for photos of the parcel, all the eBay details etc, and so I duly sent them the info required. Next I get a message to say that had found it and that was going to be delivered on the 6th of May, which did happen.
I have now claimed my carriage costs to be refunded, which they have agreed to and that will take a few days to sort out, apparently.
Now I'm wondering if the parcel was intercepted on route because you have to declare the contents when booking it and armed with its insurance value, give a pretty good clue as to the quality of the item within, or am I being a bit too presumptuous here? Thoughts?
I mean it was a pretty big box as you can see from the photo used as POD by the courier, how could you lose that???
At the end of it all, the buyer seems happy with it all and said that the packing did its job and everything is fine with the stereo and has left me excellent feedback, and I have done the same for them.