The "invalid tracking number" thing drives me nuts. Both Fedex and UPS do it. How hard is it to stick a record in the database the moment a tracking number is generated so that I don't get a "This tracking number is invalid" message? And it's not like it's invalid for a few minutes; I've had tracking numbers remain "invalid" for almost a day. Absolutely insane.
I hate auto-advancing fields. Auto-focus on page load puts you in the right place to start. Auto-advancing disrupts you in the middle of typing.<p>I would auto-advancing only if I am creating a form I am certain will be used over and over again by the same person. Even then, I would strongly consider if that is really any better than having the correct tab order defined.
25 years ago when I worked in a small shipping department for a computer reseller we had amazing experiences with UPS. Everything just worked. Their software was good, pickups were on time, delivery end was never a problem. Our computer could print tracking numbers directly and if you searched on ups.com for them even before pickup time they showed the status of waiting to be picked up, then within an hour of being picked up, even before they got to the local depot the status would change to picked up. It was amazingly good.<p>How has so much gone so backwards since then? Is it just that the volume of packages now is tremendously higher and the budgets for IT to keep up haven’t scaled appropriately?
Family worked the phone line reconciling missing delivery. Her favourite was the shark lost on a train to a local tropical fish store.<p>Be nice to your delivery phone support. They often have discretionary "make this problem go away" budget and they use it on customers who are polite and accept the limits of reality as it emerges.
Nitpick of mine: timezones.<p>I work in a different timezone than where I live, so my laptop is set to a different time for convenience.<p>Half the time, the delivery time is adapted to my computer clock, half the time, to the local time.<p>Ok ok I know, I brought that to myself... but what's nice is to clarify which time zone you use when you give a time.
I only really have experience with FedEx. The app is indeed utter trash. (Seriously, it’s so bad they should remove it until it’s useful.) Even fedex.com is pretty bad — good luck figuring out which address fields end up on the package in what order. The price estimator for different delivery classes behaves truly oddly.<p>And, having recently had the misfortune of shipping to the UK, eww. The tracking webpage shows problems. The phone support people give actively wrong answers. The customs clearance <i>email</i> team will give useful info <i>if you email them first</i>. And somehow the combination of FedEx + the UK was entirely unable to understand a normal person shipping to a business, and they got stuck needing an EORI. I eventually got the recipient (um, consignee) to send theirs, and the package got unstuck. Never mind that all online info is fairly clear that non-UK individuals don’t need an EORI.<p>P.S. For US domestic shipping, unless you have actual volume discounts with someone, use pirateship.com or a similar service. If you book directly or, worse, show up at a UPS or FedEx store without a label, you pay much, much more. For LTL freight, use freightquote.com or similar. For LCL international freight, I have no idea — FedEx international appears to be less expensive for single large items that any LCL provider I found.
Delivery has always been a "push" model. The seller is ultimately responsible for delivering your purchases to you, and they outsource it to a few entrenched players. I wonder if there's room for disruption in the form of a "pull" model delivery company: I pay a company to deliver my packages, and provide a nice UI/UX and maybe lose my package less frequently to boot. Then retailers will integrate with this service and alert the company to come pick up the package. Of course at first most retailers won't offer this integration, and that's okay.
Here in Germany, it seems delivery services are inefficient, stupid, and clumsy. When you order a package on Amazon, it will indicate a time range of delivery likeliness with a high degree of uncertainty. Then you'll get an email stating the package is going to be delivered tomorrow. Sometimes that actually happens. Time window: the whole day. They don't like to commit to a time until very short before delivery time. Which is usually when working people are not at home.<p>I tried signing up with DHL once only to find out that that gave me the opportunity to actually pay them for the privilege of not wasting their time trying to deliver to me when I'm not home. That sounds a bit backwards to me. Why would I pay them to make their life easier. I'm fine with them delivering to a neighbor or nearby dhl store. I'd tell them to do that if I had the chance. But I'm not going to pay them for the privilege. And that's just DHL, there are about five or so different companies that Amazon works with here plus some contractors.<p>So, they keep on wasting trying to deliver packages to people that, mostly, aren't home. The problem is of course made worse by the fact that there are multiple delivery companies each wasting time in the same way. I'd say a rather large amount of packages gets delivered to neighbors or wherever after the delivery people waste time trying to deliver to the right place. Predictably, there are a percentage of lost packages which then need to be reimbursed by Amazon, which no doubt impacts the delivery companies. So, on top of the lost time, they end up dealing with that as well. That's inefficient and stupid.<p>It strikes me that not having a working relationship with the people you deliver too is costing these companies a lot of money. Why is that? What's so hard here? They have no insight in when people are at home, what alternative delivery options would be convenient, etc. How hard can it be to coordinate this in a way that is less likely to be mutually disappointing?
I know it's not exactly what the article is about, but I just had to share <a href="https://parcelsapp.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://parcelsapp.com/</a> as amazing UX for tracking packages. It's third party and seems to be made by a single guy (not me) but it does everything you wish all the other first party package tracking apps did.
I think this touches on an important point that my personal experience on both the customer side and the retail side rhymes well with. When it comes to third party services such as payment and delivery, customers rarely see a distinction between the service provider and the retailer. This makes sense, since the identity of the service provider is often not even known to the customer. But to the retailer there is of course a clear distinction, and because of this they may greatly overestimate how well the customer can distinguish between the retailer and service providers.
Live in Sweden and I think we currently have pretty good competition in the delivery service market. Home delivery, staffed pick up points and unmanned parcel cabinets are usually available options from many online vendors, and the latter two often support electronic identification.<p>I think having multiple options is a good way of decoupling the UX of the delivery service with the UX of the retailer since the user is choosing the delivery service. If your only option is FedEx or UPS and you have a bad experience, that will hurt your trust in the retailer as well. But if you have several options for delivery and one fails you might instead stop using that delivery service/option when possible and opt for a different one next time.
Where is the end of the story where the police are contacted and asked why the single wheatabix was intercepted?<p>Only reason I read through this... :(
I have been working with parcel delivery for years now (with approx 20 carriers) - and building on top of tracking data is trickier than it appear. "Let's show a timeline of the package delivery status, how hard can it be??".<p>Well, often the carrier itself does not have an accurate picture of what is going on. Mistakes happen on the ground, and result in all kinds of gap between what is shown on the tracking page and what happened in reality.