John Fricker

My postman and the Royal Mail have been a lifeline over the past ten months as I have increasingly turned to online shopping because of COVID. Not a single item of the many items of post I have received and sent has been lost or significantly delayed. Now there is a parcel collection service I am no longer reliant on the two-days-a-week part-time post office in my village. And with Hermes having become so unreliable I am paying extra to send parcels by Royal Mail for peace of mind.

It isn't DHL's fault and not a problem unique to the courier but be aware of the possibility that a parcel routed through Hong Kong en route to another country might be randomly selected by Hong Kong customs for inspection even though it is not being imported into Hong Kong.

It is 2 December and my parcel that should have been delivered to my son in Japan on 30 November has been delayed in Hong Kong since 26 November for what DHL has told me is an "additional security inspection" by Hong Kong customs. The parcel contains nothing more than Christmas gifts for our son. My wife spent a considerable time choosing and carefully wrapping the gifts and she is upset at the prospect of the parcel being opened and the items unwrapped.

I have to say that DHL's customer services people have done their best to resolve the issue and have answered my messages promptly and reassuringly. But they have no control over the actions of Hong Kong customs.

I don't experience too many problems with Royal Mail and I have nothing but praise for my postman. Now it has got even better with the introduction of a 72p parcel collection service. This allows me to send tracked items that previously had to be taken to a post office (open only two half days a week in my local village hall since the sub post office closed) for a certificate of posting or items that are too large to go in a post box.

I think Royal Mail has introduced the parcel collect service because of COVID but there must be many people who would have welcomed it when they started closing sub post offices.

Unlike Selectspecs which has moved production of their budget glasses to China with a long delivery time, Low Cost Glasses manufacture in the UK and the glasses are delivered by Royal Mail.

I ordered a pair of 'Baseline Albert' glasses because I needed some cheap intermediate glasses for VDU use. I wasn't expecting great quality frames for such a low price but I was pleasantly surprised. I might well get my next pair of distance glasses from Low Cost Glasses.

Don't waste time on this site if you are sending a parcel containing multiple items. The booking process requires you to provide a summary of the items being sent but that is impossible within the limited number of characters allowed. Customer services was unable to suggest a solution to this problem. I gave up and paid more to use another service that was far less hassle.

This was my second order of the same budget spectacles from SelectSpecs. I regularly wear them when using my laptop and at other times when my distance spectacles would be too strong. The quality is excellent for the price and the first pair has lasted well.

My only criticism is the budget spectacles are now made in China and they took four weeks to be delivered. But I cannot grumble too much when this must have been done to keep the price low.

I have to add to the tales of woe about the couriers used by Wilko for online deliveries, compounded by some inadequate packing.

In my case the courier was DPD, about which I have also posted an adverse review. My wife placed an order for several items and paid extra for faster delivery. The parcel failed to arrive and DPD's tracking claimed nobody was in to receive it. The photo taken by DPD's driver of the house where he attempted delivery showed an unoccupied neighbour's house which has an obviously different house sign.

DPD gave the parcel a lunchtime delivery slot two days later but it arrived four hours late in the evening with the side of the box split open and two of the items damaged. The damage was partly Wilko's fault because the damaged items were inadequately protected and the box was inadequately padded out.

At least DPD now provides a photo taken by the driver so you know which WRONG house is where they left a card to say they couldn't deliver because nobody was there to sign. So I know why my wife's urgent parcel I waited in for on a Friday wasn't delivered. The photo was of a neighbour's house that has a completely different name on the wall. Not only that but the house has signs, scaffolding and green algae on the white PVC of the door and windows for example, that to most people would suggest it is undergoing building works and is unoccupied.

I had to wait until after the weekend for a Monday delivery. But even on the Monday the parcel wasn't delivered within the luchtime time slot but in the evening and by a different driver to the one who had initially taken it out. So I wasted more time waiting for the parcel. But that wasn't the end of what had become a nightmare. When the parcel arrived the box was split, probably by the transfers between vans, and three of the items inside were damaged.

I don't know what has happened to DPD. I have previously had no problems with the company and parcels have been delivered well within the time slot. Perhaps DPD is setting its drivers unrealistic delivery targets but I would currently avoid buying from online sellers that use the company.

I'm not having a good time with Royal Mail Group services recently. This time they have lost an item that was sent by Royal Mail 24 tracked. I know from the tracking that the package arrived at my local delivery office on 26 March and had been sorted and scheduled for delivery that day but it never left the delivery office. It is now 09 April and the item is officially lost.

Long gone are the days when you could phone the delivery office so when it still hadn't arrived on 29 March I had a long wait on the phone to get through to Royal Mail Customers Services. They said they would contact the delivery office manager who I asssumed would get somebody to find the package and send it on its way. I phoned Customer Services again the following day when it still hadn't arrived and I was told the manager had 72 hours to contact me. I heard nothing. My postman helpfully offered to speak to the manager. Still I heard nothing and as I then needed the item urgently I had to order another one which fortunately arrived on time.

UPDATE
My package did finally arrive - over TWO MONTHS late. The tracking showed it had inexplicably been sent on a tour of delivery offices in my county, and one in the next county.

I opted for next day delivery on 22 March for a spare part for my van to get it back in the road with minimum delay. I checked the tracking when the item hadn't arrived and it told me a delivery had been attempted at a time when I was in the same room as the doorbell receiver and that a card had been left by the driver when it hadn't. I suspect delivery had been attempted to the wrong address.

The earliest I could book redelivery online was 26 March so I shall be without the use of my van for an additional three working days.

The only good thing I can say about Parcelforce is that it was easy to book a redelivery online but a service like Hermes would have automatically made two further attempts to deliver and I would have received the item the next day.

Not for the first time the driver, presumably to save time, did not bother to ring our doorbell and left the parcel by our front door with a card pushed though the letterbox to say it had been left in our "porch" (we don't have one) as a "safe place". I was awake at 07:44 when the delivery was made but the doorbell usually wakes me anyway. Fortunately I checked my emails about half an hour later and saw the delivery notification so I was able to retrieve the parcel before it got soaked by rain.

On the plus side the parcel arrived in two days.

Firstly, the DNA test kit was sent from the US by a non-airmail service and took two weeks to arrive. Why can't a stock of kits be held by an agent in Europe for faster delivery to European customers?

Secondly, receipt of the kit wasn't registered by the laboratory until a week after the slowest airmail time. I had to phone to check what was happening and even with that there was a niggle bcause the UK phone number is presented in the form somebody outside the UK would dial and had to be converted. The person who answered was helpful and reassuring but I got the impression that slow registration by the laboratory was normal.

The results, received over two weeks after the sample has been registered, were presented as a basic percentage breakdown of my ancestral countries. Perhaps that's all the basic service offers but I was left feeling a little disapponted.

Plusnet provides a good service when everything is working but when things go wrong it is a different story. The last couple of times I've needed to contact their technical support there have been unacceptable waiting times of up to an hour.

On the first occasion there was still 24/7 support so I called back in the middle of the night to get a faster response.

The second time my phone had stopped working as well and there was no way I was going hang on with the possibility of my mobile phone's battery running down. Plusnet's 24/7 support has finished and even though I phoned back at 7:30 when the support lines reopen I still had to wait getting on for a quarter of an hour.

I cannot fault the techical support provided when I have eventually got through.