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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> Royal Mail told me, apologetically, that HP requested the return of the laptop while it was out for delivery, a request so rare no relevant tracking update existed. So the driver scanned the “refused delivery” option.

I'm genuinely curious -- how does this even work? This isn't something I've ever heard of anybody being able to do, for the sender to cancel delivery mid-way.

Is this someone anyone can do? Only large corporate customers? Or something in a custom contract? How does the delivery service even handle it -- do they manually call the driver on the phone and be like, "hey never mind about that one package"?

This all just seems so random.

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Anyone can do it for personal shipments on UPS.com I realized last week when I needed to re-route the package. The seller can do it and so can the buyer. But I also noticed the seller can just cancel the delivery.

Immediately realized it could be used for fraud by pretending to prove the shipment.

In my experience only the sender can do this.

But how do they validate the request came from the sender?

They probably only allow it for business customers. In which case there's a shipper account associated with the tracking number and they have online access to view/manage all outgoing parcels/deliveries.

This used to be called Quantum View; a quick google suggests it still is.

You create an account if you are sending online. The shipment is linked to that account. Then when you ship in-person you can add those shipments to your online account via some id on the shipping receipt last time I checked.

It depends on the terms of the shipment; if you're paying the shipping company, you can choose who can redirect it.

I routinely rerouted my packages in San Diego since UPS wouldn't attempt delivery. You can do it with most packages unless the seller specifically has specifically forbidden it, (thank you Ingram Micro for sending me on a 3 day chase for my package)

Amazon India can't do this - or that is what they have told me. This has happened with me multiple times. I ordered an item that I didn't want anymore and they clearly said they can't do anything about it and I should just refuse accepting it or raise a return and refund later which they assured on email they would do.

Strangely, they said they can re-route the package to another address if I tha is what I wanted. So I said why not reroute to themselves or the seller? Well, that also was not possible. Weird.

As for delivery people scanning something like refused delivery or so (incorrectly) - it's very regular with Amazon in India (pretty sure with others as well; but I have pretty only been ordering from Amazon of late). Amazon gives you a pretty wide delivery time range - something like 7am to 9pm - yup that wide and there is no way for you know of a shorter time window. Now the delivery folks are extremely overloaded and overworked. So you wait and wait and wait and suddenly at 10pm, sometimes even at 11pm you receive a SMS saying something on the lines of "not present at address", "attempted delivery failure" and you know that was not the case. After a while you give up even raising this issue with Amazon.

> Amazon India can't do this - or that is what they have told me. This has happened with me multiple times. I ordered an item that I didn't want anymore and they clearly said they can't do anything about it and I should just refuse accepting it or raise a return and refund later which they assured on email they would do.

Can't and won't are easily confused. Probably Amazon (India) won't recall the package, and the customer service rep can't request it per policy. Likely their delivery contract includes return shipping for refused packages at a lower rate than recalled packages. But if it's a pricing error of thousands of pounds, it may make sense to pay for a recall; I've also seen recalls for gross packaging errors, if the shipping department sends a carton of items instead of unboxing the carton and sending the individual items as expected. It's much easier to ask the carrier to recall the package than to work with the customer, although proper notice to the customer should be included... For one thing, carrier recalls don't always work.

> Can't and won't are easily confused

If you notice the entire sentence, after the hyphen as well, it clearly mentions what it was. I will spell out - they said they "couldn't" and I added that is what they told me. As in they stated on a recorded call and then also sent an email stating just that that "they can't".

Besides

> customer service rep can't request it per policy …. .. contract includes .. ..

Is it meaningfully different from "can't" or "won't" or "don't usually"? I don't think so.

And when it's a case of an exception then of course all it needs, among other methods, is one call from some supply chain manager at the seller to the supply chain manager at the courier/shipper and it gets done, irrespective of what their CRM/CMS/or IT infra supports or not.

Amazon won't, so their reps can't.

I had a similar "delivery failure" experience in bangalore anomaly a decade ago and that too from courier company FedEx which kinda guarantees delivery times. When I talked to the guy the next day, he apologized and said there were too many packages and that's the only way they see to push things to next day without getting docked for it. Shitty but that seemed to be the common practice - not that I ran into it again just going by how it was explained to me.

And then I have had it happen a couple of times here in US I think mostly during early Covid days probably when the prime delivery was new and still building its edge conditions around deliveries (taking pictures, emails split second after delivery).

They can recall if the seller requests a recall for any reason. Not the customer. Typical use cases include wrong product sent, wrong packaging, missed an item etc. It's a rare scenario but it has happened to people I know.

From a customer's perspective, they cannot recall. Likely, if you order via Amazon with Amazon delivery, the contract they have with the seller for Amazon delivery mandates them to deliver it to the user. Every seller is charged for returns/replacements as well and so it would be kind of confusing and arbitrary if they just returned the product on the way to delivery.

> sometimes even at 11pm you receive a SMS saying something on the lines of "not present at address", "attempted delivery failure" and you know that was not the case

LaserShip in the US is notorious for this. Amazon uses it for a lot of same-day/1-day stuff, and I'd say at least 80% of the time I get a fake "not present at address" around 9:30 pm that evening, and it actually gets delivered the next afternoon.

I have to assume LaserShip has some contract that they have to deliver x% of packages on time, and this is how they manage to avoid that entirely. And I'm sure Amazon is 100% aware, but they don't care because if somebody calls customer service to complain, they just blame it on LaserShip.

I've had Amazon attempt (but fail to) intercept a package in transit--it was going to be too late, I had cancelled the order and bought it locally. When the shipping e-mail showed up we were on the other side of the world, nobody was around to get $500 of stuff off our porch. Fortunately, no porch pirates and no rain, it was fine when we got home.

Posted goods belong to the seller until you've got them in your hands.

Royal Mail has some types of tracked packages that can be redirected by the poster.

I've done this (or rather, had the sender do this) multiple times. I'm surprise that Royal Mail was surprised.

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