Roaming the Roads

It's said that online, if you're not paying for it, you aren't the customer. But it worth noting that there are times when even though you are paying for it, you still aren't the customer. And in e-commerce, one of those times is shipping.

Since shipping is a contract between the retailer and the shipping company, the purchaser isn't a party to the transaction, even though they are the one paying for it (if only through higher prices). And it leads to what strike me as consistently poor experiences that wouldn't happen as often if the shipper needed to convince the customer to use them next time.

I recently ordered from bookshelves from IKEA. The shipper's priorities were clearly to get the task done as quickly as possible, rather than following either the shipping instructions or their own updates to me. The boxes arrived several hours prior to when they were scheduled, forcing me to step away from a video call to take delivery, and the shipper intended to leave the boxes outside, when the instructions were that they were to be brought inside - something that I'd paid an extra cost for. And the shipper didn't wait around for the boxes to be counted or inspected, despite the fact that they were supposed to sign the shipping manifest attesting to the fact that everything had been delivered.

But, being paid by IKEA, they had no incentive to actually follow the directions. IKEA's feedback form discourages customers from leaving information that could be used to identify the customer or the order, and so prevents them from going back to the shipper and noting specific instances of poor performance or even following up with the customer.

I also recently ordered some books from Barnes and Noble. They haven't arrived yet. This despite the fact that on Monday, the package was supposedly in Fife, Washington, less than 40 miles from here.

As of this point, I have no idea where my books are, and neither does anyone else. The tracking site doesn't even give an estimated delivery date any longer. Not that it can be trusted - the package was magically somehow here in Kirkland three days before I placed the order, and is supposed to have gone from southern Oregon to Fife in less than 90-minutes, a feat that would be difficult to manage even by air. And once the tracking page is shown as untrustworthy, what's the point of it?

One of my co-workers pointed out that at this rate, I could have asked them to hold the package for me in Fife when it arrived on Monday, and I could have walked there, picked it up, and come back in less time than it's taking the combination of UPS and the United States Postal Service (which is normally the most reliable of the bunch, in my opinion) to coordinate moving a box less than an hour's drive.

But again, United Parcel Service isn't working for me, they're working for Barnes and Noble, who don't really care about how long it takes, so long as something arrives eventually.

And this isn't unusual. Items I order online routinely arrive late, and one never arrived at all. At the same time, I've received multiple mis-delivered packages, some that missed their intended target by miles. Strangely, shippers don't have a way for people to call them and say "you gave me someone else's package," or a plan for what to do when someone does.

Another thing that I've noticed with delivery, is that tracking sites will often claim that a package will be on-time until past the time that it was due to be delivered. That the Barnes and Noble site seemed to figure it out a couple of hours in advance of the deadline was actually somewhat of a surprise. Although it should have been fairly clear that if the Postal Service hadn't formally accepted the package by this morning, when it would have needed to be on a delivery truck, that something was amiss.

In any event, the problem is that it isn't a problem; not for the retailers anyway. They don't make any promises as to when items will arrive, regardless of the shipping option selected, and individual customers aren't usually worth enough for them to worry about that business going elsewhere.

Generally speaking, I find that retailers that offer multiple options for the shipper tend to have better experiences, since the customer selects the shipper. Whether shippers understand this to be the case I don't know, but it does seem to make a difference, so I suspect that there's something at work there. In any event, it's part of what prompts me to shop in-person rather than online. And maybe that's part of the goal.