Hacker News Reader

Comment by tazjin | Hacker News Reader

My experience with shipping companies (no matter which one, and in 4 different countries) is that they generally don't manage to deliver a large fraction of packages. The failure rate must be above 20%, which would be unacceptable for most other kinds of systems.

Every now and then someone convinces me to try Amazon - my most recent experiment with it involved 3 orders, of which they managed to deliver 1. This is to an address in Central London.

I guess you might have a different experience with shipping services in the very grid-like, regular, easily adressable American suburbs - but IME in Europe the most reliable way to get some goods is still to buy them in a physical shop.

View on HN

I feel like this might be getting awful close to victim blaming but I can't help wonder if there is something wrong with your address / delivery situation if you are losing that many parcels.

I'm in the outskirts of London (previously Greater London). If I purchase something from Amazon I expect it to drop through my door the next day. They do this almost without fail. More often I'm surprised when things arrive earlier than I expected.

Actually at that rate I think its probably more likely a simple error an the address database somewhere. Something simple like the postcode is in the address4 field rather than the postcode field. 20% of the time the employee rejects it as they are highly incentivised to process them quickly.

The failure rate is most definitely far lower than 20% in the US. How would any online retail business survive with a 20% or more loss rate? Retail profit margins are in the single digits, it would make no sense. Not to mention the ludicrousness of only getting 4 out of 5 packages, people would just opt to go to a store to get things.

It has been a while since I worked in ecommerce, but we tracked our lost package claims by carrier and I believe they all hovered a bit under 1% for USPS, UPS and Fedex in the US, so I don’t think your experience is really a reflection of the industry.

I've never had a lost delivery in about 5 years with any delivery company. Maybe check with the post why your address seems to be a black hole?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com