A Cumbrian business owner says she is missing 85 packages worth over £2,500 as a result of issues with a parcel courier service.
Jody Johnston, 35, of Whitehaven, owner of Northern Soul Scents, claimed she had had two large batches of parcels go missing since mid-November, which has caused chaos for both her and her customers.
The business owner said she first had 50 parcels – containing wax melts, candles, room sprays and fragrance oils – go missing in November, and still has no understanding of where her parcels are.
Last week, 35 of Jody’s parcels also went missing in the same way, she claimed.
She uses commercial platform Shopify to send her parcels. Shopify uses the courier Evri.
Evri said they had not been provided with any details about the parcels issue in November and as Jody was not a direct customer of the firm, it could not investigate it properly and could not verify the claims.
When parcels are taken to a parcel drop-off shop, they are scanned once upon arrival and a second time once they enter the delivery van.
All of Jody’s missing parcels appear on the online tracking link as at the parcel drop-off shop, despite Jody confirming with the shop owner, who she works closely with, that the parcels had been collected.
She said: “From mid-November until now, we have lost 85 parcels, and I’m still discovering more today.
“We started to get loads of complaints from customers through to say that the tracking link had been stuck for five or six days saying their order was at the parcel shop.
“It just stayed like that, the tracking link information never moved on and the customers never received their parcels.
“The woman at the parcel shop can remember these parcels all being picked up and we’ve used them for three years now so we know the problem is not with the parcel shop.
“It looks like they have not scanned been scanned in when they’ve been put into the van and then I don’t know what has happened to them after that.
“It was a nightmare because just as we discovered this problem had happened and customers were emailing in, it was Black Friday, which is our busiest weekend of the year, and we get around 50 to 60 per cent more orders than usual.
“We ended up having to remake and resend all the missing orders, it was horrendous.”
An Evri spokesman said: “We have been in touch with Jody to apologise for the delay and offer our support. We are helping Jody towards a solution with Shopify, the company she has sent the parcels with.
“Meanwhile we’re investigating an isolated issue and we are working on getting these parcels moving through our network.
“We recommend customers always get in touch with the company they’ve either ordered from, or booked a parcel delivery through, as they hold the information on the customer and are best placed to quickly get them support.”
Jody said that while her business was able to manage the loss, it had been a nightmare to deal with and that little support had been provided by Evri.
She said: “I thought in November well maybe it’s a one-off, because it has never happened to us before.
“We’ve never had a full batch go missing at once and Evri are the most cost effective option and usually they are quite good for us.
“But I’ve just discovered that the exact same thing has happened again and it’s devastating really because it’s upwards of £2,500 of products it has cost us.
“It’s also the time and money to get products resent out to customers or to refund them.
“We handmake all our products so we’ve got to make them all from scratch and we’ve got to repay for the postage because they won’t even refund the postage.”
Shopify has declined to compensate her for the parcels so far.
She said: “The majority of the parcels they’re refusing to compensate for one of two reasons.
“One, they contain glass or liquid, because it’s perfume and oil products it’s in their policy they’re not responsible for those products, which I understand from a damage perspective.
“But this isn’t a case of damage, those parcels haven’t been scanned in and registered on the van and are just lost, so it doesn’t seem fair.
“The other reason we’re getting is if they’re not scanned in at the van, we can’t prove that Evri ever handled the parcel, so they’re just denying any liability at all.
“I think people just assume there will be a way for business to claim the loss back. I’m very tenacious and will be on the case when I need to be, but I’m literally up against a brick wall and I can’t do anything about it.”
While Jody has used the courier for two years without issues, she said her recent experiences made her worry for other small businesses using the courier.
Typically, Jody said her business posts out around 500 to 600 parcels weekly and while Evri normally lose or damage around one to two per cent of their parcels every week, she said this was a similar rate to Royal Mail.
Jody said: “From today we’ve started using Royal Mail for everything, which is fine for us, but for other smaller businesses, it’s quite difficult, because Post Offices close at 5pm, whereas Evri drop-off closes at 8pm.
“It’s also a little bit more expensive per parcel and with Royal Mail, to have a business account, you have to open a line of credit with them, so your business has to have a credit rating essentially.
“A lot of smaller businesses aren’t able to do that and that means they’re kind of stuck using Evri or Yodel or something like that.
“We’re more a medium sized business and we did really well over Christmas, but a £2,500 loss in the space of a month for a smaller business could just mean it would go under. I do think businesses need to be wary of things like this.”
In November, Evri apologised to customers in West Cumbria after parcels went missing.
In an earlier version of this article, we said we had provided Evri with all the details of Jody’s issues. We provided all the tracking numbers but not Jody’s details. Evri asked us to clarify this.
If you have lost parcels in a similar way to Jody, let us know by emailing us at [email protected]
