Now that’s a real headline again: “Trader threatens ruin because of parcel centre” was the headline of the Frankfurter Rundschau, without mentioning the name of the allegedly ruined person. But the person responsible – DHL – is getting a thrashing. Sure, in the fight of David against Goliath, you have to support the little one. This is why the colleagues from the Online Merchant News were happy to pick up the thread. Nevertheless, I want to briefly describe what was to be read in the Frankfurter Rundschau.

parcel service
parcel services

An online retailer that has been satisfied with the DHL service up to now sends 15 to 100 parcels a day, all of which reach the customer after one or two days. Suddenly it takes up to ten days. Thanks to tracking, it is possible to track back and forth between different DHL depots. What is going on here? Another postal strike? On the contrary, the yellow giant is heading for the future and is currently putting a new parcel center in the postcode area of our online retailer into trial operation. It’s sure to be a big deal one day, but for now it’s stuck. With bad consequences for the online retailer. The customers protest, complain and return. The result is a 70 percent drop in sales, downgrading of the eBay rating and thus poorer ranking in the eBay search. Of course, this does not happen overnight and the commentary columns are full of good advice from colleagues on how to change logistics service providers quickly. But does it happen so quickly? And who knows what happens then? In general, DHL works great, but there are also cases like this one from time to time.

But there’s really no reason to jeopardize your business. You have different payment methods, if the credit card gateway doesn’t work, for example, an alternative will take over. For this purpose, one has usually connected so-called payment service providers. Exactly the same thing exists for shipping, namely shipping service providers like shipcloud.

This means that the retailer could have sent his parcels by DPD or Hermes without any additional effort and would have had to disappoint far fewer or no customers. This would have meant that a problem with the parcel service would not have become his own.

Hence my clear recommendation to all online traders not to make themselves too dependent on a parcel service. By using a shipping service provider, you create the conditions to react quickly and flexibly to problems with the delivery of your customer orders.