So I ordered a load of different stuff to be delivered – purely for the purposes of research, you understand – and here are the results, speaking as a regular domestic customer. The sort of person you’d want to come back to your store and order more goodies.
No-one can beat good old Royal Mail for cheap untraced post, and ParcelForce and DPD for larger items. Top marks to RM and DPD especially, for being able to give an accurate one hour delivery time slot on the day.
In the middle of the pack, we have companies like UKMail, who are unable to give a good delivery time estimate, and occasionally even unaware of whether an item has left the depot or not. Their saving grace is their drivers – every single one I’ve met has been courteous and helpful.
Yodel (whose couriers take the parcels home and store them god knows where pending the maximum 3 delivery attempts) have also failed to impress me. The local depot staff are pretty rude and lazy, too.
And then right at the very bottom, at the root of the problem tree, there are companies like Hermes. Obviously, I am judging them from a very limited geographic sample – but the “lifestyle couriers” I’ve had the misfortune to deal with have been unprofessional to the extent of being rude. The last one tried to deliver 3 times on the same day, roughly every hour, and when I eventually got in and found the (one) card she left me (the first attempt) and called, it was somewhat akin to being subjected the the third degree. If I wasn’t me, she would have had me crying for forgiveness for daring to be absent when she came to the door.
And while on the subject of shopping, I have just placed my first (and, at this rate, only one ever) order with La Redoute. Their “My Account” area is badly laid out and uninformative, the delivery time is nothing like what they promised on the checkout screens, you can’t use voucher codes unless your entire order conforms to the code you’re trying to use (e.g. I had full-price autumn range items, and reduced sale items, and it wouldn’t let me use the “% off first order on full price items” code) and they charge for delivery regardless of the order amount. Shan’t be using them again in a hurry.
To finish on a positive note – here are examples of companies whose service I was impressed by: both Pia Jewellery and Screwfix, who deliver exactly as they promise.
