usps delivery confirmation sucks
i sell a lot of stuff on ebay and have found that the usps priority shipping is the fastest and least expensive way to ship things within the united states. on top of reasonable shipping rates, usps priority boxes, stickers, and tape are free, so i usually use this method for most of the things i ship. i also usually pay the extra $.65 for the delivery confirmation for piece of mind, although i usually don’t keep track of the receipts since i had never had a problem with a delivery.
so yesterday i get an email asking if i had shipped an item yet for an something i had shipped about a month ago! the item was only worth about $50, so if i had to eat the loss it wouldn’t've been the end of the world, but i was still freaking out. i started looking for the delivery confirmation number in all the places i usually stuff receipts with no luck. since i purchase my postage at the post office and not online, there’s no online record of it. i found the credit card statement for the postage purchase, but when i called usps they said they couldn’t find the delivery confirmation based off of the credit card purchase… fuck. so yeh, if you lose the delivery confirmation number, there’s no record anywhere that it was delivered. it’s not even directly related to the address you’re shipping to, only the zip code. after a day of fretting, i randomly found it in a drawer in my office while looking for something else, sent it to the buyer, and if he complains it’s his problem, because as long as you have a delivery confirmation number, paypal sides with the seller.
in searching for answers to my problem though, i ran across a lot of instances where the delivery confirmation number shows that it was delivered, even though it was delivered to the wrong address, and since it doesn’t require a signature or is even associated with a specific address, it doesn’t do much if your package is lost. so yeh, if you’re shipping something expensive, use a solid shipper like ups/fedex/dhl, and if you do use usps, don’t lose the frickin’ delivery confirmation number.
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Yeah man, all those confirmations mean is that they got to the hub the delivers to that address. It’s the most BS thing ever. Best way is to do UPS… Make them pay for it. If they complain, you have a good story as to why they pay more.
Well, I have example of Usps confirmation number that shows its not yet delivered (Shipped a month ago), but received positive feedback from buyer.
Although I usually check the tracking only if there’s a problem with the delivery, I have on three occasions sent a package with delivery confirmation which was not tracked by USPS. On one of them, it was tracked as having been received by the PO at my end, but not as having been delivered, although it was. The two others were never entered into the system, but fortunately they were delivered. This is clearly not a reliable system.
You payed for the cheapest confirmation that the USPS offers. That just tells you when it was delivered to the house. You could have gotten signature confirmation that cost only a little more and it would have required a signature from the addressee. And add in a return receipt that is mailed back to you. Lots of different way to send a package through USPS, and it’s always cheaper than the other companies.