It's that time of the year again when we want to pull out our hair... well, I do, Chris shaves his head LOL and all I have to say is "Shipping during the Holiday Season with USPS"!
Every year, we face the same issue: delayed shipments, things shipped to totally wrong areas, and a lack of properly scanned packages. You see, we still have a few orders that went out earlier last week that are showing as "Shipment Received, Package Acceptance Pending" and then nothing. Rest assured, your packages get sent out the very same day that the label is created, though. Just now, I sent Chris with Print Outs to the Post Office a few minutes ago to hopefully get some answers. But I thought, let me open the curtain a bit and let you know our process...
1. We get your order and select the roaches. Chris brings the box inside, and I tackle all of the boxing up, packing, etc. I weigh the box and create the shipping label in our Shipping program, which is connected to USPS and to our order system. It also sets the order as shipped and sends you a notification email with your individual tracking number.
2. I print out a manifest that is basically one tracking code for USPS to scan and encompasses all of the individual shipping labels for that day. It looks something like this one. They scan that, and all shipments show up in their system.
3. We go to the Post office, grab our bin (the Post office gave us our own bin since we come four out of 7 days of the week), load up the bin with our packages, and then one of the employees comes out to get our bin and bring it inside into a temperature-controlled environment. We hand over the manifest.
4. We go home.
5. At around 4 p.m., a big truck comes and picks up our post Office Packages, which go to the Orlando hub that same day and are distributed to different hubs, etc., before getting to your house.
Now, normally, Packages run through a machine, and everything gets scanned. However, packages with live animals are scanned manually by a human being. This is where USPS unfortunately fails. We don't know if the hand scanners don't transmit properly or if they just don't get scanned properly. After Step 4, we are no longer in the know and, unfortunately, only have access to the same information you do as we access the same link in your email.
We generally give the post office a few days to deliver your Roaches to you but start tapping our fingers when it takes longer than usual and, at some point, march ourselves to the Post Office requesting a better update that we can pass on to you. We understand your frustration when your packages don't arrive on time. I promise you that the issue is never on our end, but 100% lies within the transit system.
Some of you have asked us if we can't ship with UPS or FedEx, and the short answer is, unfortunately, not. Not only are those trucks not temperature controlled (see our experiment we did a few years ago here), but we also live very rurally and ca. 20 miles from the nearest drop-off points. We could, of course, have them pick up the packages, but they charge an astronomical fee for daily pickups, and we just can't justify raising our prices to make up for that cost and still don't have a guarantee that everything arrives alive and on time and the issue of no temperature control still remains.
That said, please know that in the past 6 years of owning Luna Roaches, we've never had a customer walk away unhappy when all was said and done, and we will always make sure that you're 100% satisfied with us. Our Customer's Happiness is and will always remain our number one priority!
I hope this gives you a little more insight into what goes on behind the scenes.
We hope you enjoy the rest of your week :)
Cheers,
Mel & Chris
Luna Roaches
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