Comment · Fri, December 2, 2022 · ND Owner
Is it normal for an order I made on monday to still have "Shipment Information Received" as status?
Original post in this thread
biomatics · 2 points
It is an international order sent through Standard International Mail. Does that status mean it still is in the warehouse after 4 days or is it just a delay in the updating of the status?
What they were answering
Direct reply to the original post — see the thread post above.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
Everything leaves our warehouse that day. I can make a video for you. Nothing sits around. Our warehouse it spotless and devoid of packages every night. If my team misses even a handful of packages because of something, they tell me. They know I get super pissed if orders don't go out in time. The issue with standard international mail is that it uses Asendia. We package all the Asendia orders up, and put them in big bags that they take from us and put on a truck. They don't scan every package in the bag, though. They just scan the big bag as a whole. This bag then goes on a truck to their California sorting center, where the packages are sorted to the various countries' postal systems. The most annoying things for me, and I guess you guys as well, is that they don't scan the individual packages till they are already sorted and moving towards the respective countries. This makes it seem like it didn't move for days, when it was moving literally the entire time. People get upset at us thinking we didn't ship it out, and we just have thousands of packages in a big pile in our warehouse waiting for... something? If you saw our operation, you would know that we can't have packages just sitting. It would bury us under a mountain of stuff. For us to even operate, the packages have to go out that day, or they would back up and hold up the tens of thousands of packages coming behind them. It would be chaos!
We moved to Asendia because people were asking us to. We were using DHL Ecommerce before, and UPS Mail Innovations before that. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. The issue is that the weaknesses are always thrown back on us. What I have found is that there just isn't a good low cost international carrier at the moment. When I started the company, we used USPS First Class a lot. That was great, as they were quick, had good tracking, and rarely lost packages. Then things changed. They started reusing tracking codes for First Class, so tracking was all jacked up. Then they started losing packages. Then Louis DeJoy took over and really fucked USPS. Back in 2013-2015 they were great. However, we were forced to shift elsewhere because of how downhill they went. UPS Mail Innovation was good for a while, but they had issues eventually as well. Then DHL came in and go us on DHL Ecommerce, which also was good for a while. However, they started to have issues during the pandemic. Then people were telling us that iHerb used Asendia, and that we should switch to that. We set things up, and things are moving pretty well to most countries. However, you have this dumb tracking delay that is causing issues. We can't win with international services right now. Everyone promises you the moon, but then you come back down to reality once you migrate to them. It is something I want to really dive into this year. If we can find a real lower cost international service that will not have some weird downside, it would make our lives so much easier, and make international customers a lot happier. We just have not found that service yet.