Reply With QuoteInteresting read. Thanks. Bookmarked for future reference
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Stuff goes missing. We've all seen the horror stories. The .gifs of sorting offices booting our valuables across the floor. Carriers casually tossing our parcels over 6' fences or flytipping them in the porch for some lowlife to steal minutes later. We've watched TV consumer programs as those b*st*rds Hermes (now Evri) auction off pallets-full of our things that THEY failed to deliver despite having clear address labels...
Some of us have been unlucky enough to try to make claims when Parcels-Smashers have done their worst - and what a bl**dy nightmare that is!!!
It feels like you have no rights, that they have an exclusion clause for everything! They don't even have any contact details, they don't reply, they blame you, they lie...
As usual, with literally no fanfare, consumer laws have apparently been amended recently to make carriers more accountable, and there are discrete advocates for us. So I'm going to quote a post I stumbled-across on a popular hifi forum which was made by a retired solicitor with personal experience in this area.
I'm very far from an expert myself, but if this info helps anyone on here even once, it's worth posting. Please add any similar info you may have. (Boring anecdotes, not so much, thanks.)
One caveat discussed after is that whatever value you declare - including any insurance you may have decided to take - is the uppermost limit of your claim, even if you subsequently discover your item was worth a lot more. Seems obvious, but worth clarifying."...This isn't about me, but the experience of pursuing a compensation claim taught me some lessons which it will be valuable for me to pass on:-
1. Find the website for Consumer Action Group. It is a mutual help forum with some tame consumer rights lawyers on board. They deal with this stuff day-in day-out. They provide free advice to punters with consumer rights grievances and a large part of their website is devoted to compensation claims against carriers for missing or damaged goods. Have a good read of the "Carriers" sub-forum to absorb a bit of what other folk (me included) have had to go through to pursue a claim. Then register to participate on the forum and post a description of your problem. The site management will assign a consumer lawyer to your case. Keep checking back on the forum to pick up your latest advice and instructions from him/her.
2. All the carrier companies (and I mean ALL) will fight tooth and nail to resist any compensation claim, even where the customer has insured the consignment. It is part of their business model to refuse all claims, and they are generally not too particular about how they do it. Much of the supposed "law" they will throw at you will be knowingly wrong. Do not underestimate how unscrupulous they are.
3. Contrary to what they will tell you you CAN proceed against them in the small claims court, despite your primary contract being with Parcel2Go or some similar comparison website. This is the result of recent(-ish) statutory modifications to the common law rules on privity of contract. You will find out about this on the Consumer Action Group forum.
4. Contrary to what they will tell you, the liability exclusion clauses they have inserted in their T&Cs (which purport to protect them from claims in the event of loss or damage) are LEGALLY INEFFECTIVE. You can't contract out of doing the very thing you have agreed to do - it makes a nonsense of the law of contract.
5. Again, contrary to what they will tell you, you do NOT have to have paid the supplementary insurance premium in order to be able to pursue a claim against them. The courts take the view that requiring the client to have insured is in effect no different to forcing them to indemnify the carrier against the negligence or dishonesty of their own employees. The Courts have explicitly struck down this requirement as an unfair contract term in decided cases.
You have to understand that the carrier company's "customer service" department will make this process as slow and painful for you as possible. They will tell you that you are wrong when you are right, they will fail to answer your emails for long periods of time, they will respond to you with exactly the same words and arguments as they did last time, even though you have demonstrated in the intervening time that their position is untenable. It will be like pulling teeth without anaesthetic. This is all intentional and a quite deliberate strategy on the carrier's part to deter would-be complainants, either by scaring them off with legally inaccurate mumbo jumbo, or just making them give up through sheer frustration. This is how they do business.
HOWEVER, if you are tenacious and persist you can push through - people have been successful in the past and have recounted their success stories on the forum. Be aware, though, that even though you do not need to have insured your consignment for your claim to succeed, any compensation you receive will nevertheless be capped at the value you quoted for your item when you booked the service. That value represents the amount of risk you have told them they are taking-on at the outset and you will not be allowed to argue that it should be a higher figure."
The Consumer Action Group: https://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/ - as mentioned above.
Resolver: https://www.resolver.co.uk/about - "Resolver is a free, independent issue resolution service. We connect consumers with organisations to help find the best outcome every time."
Citizens Advice: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/ - sometimes useful for more general issues.
HTHs! Cheers, Sod.
Interesting read. Thanks. Bookmarked for future reference
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I feel this should be made a sticky.
thanks Earl, I hope i never need to use it but it will be useful if that occasion does arise!
If I want to sell something of high value its buyer collects or arranges own shipping. Safest way and if it costs me a sale - too bad.
Yes, very interesting reading.
Always thought along these lines myself - if you pay someone to deliver something (or for any service) and they don’t, why shouldn’t they be liable? Just seems common sense.
A how-to-post-watches and what-to-do-if-it-goes-pear-shaped Sticky would be a useful thing, but poor old Eddie seems to have more pressing matters afoot at the moOriginally Posted by LondonNeil
Very useful. Thanks for posting.
I had a recent fight with Evri over a package they lost. When people say they make it as difficult as possible to make a claim they're not wrong. In the end I bombarded their CEO's email address and their online chatbot with requests for somebody to contact me as it's impossible just to phone and actually talk to a human. All worked out and I got my money back but not an easy process by any means. Shouldn't have used Evri and never will again.
I’ll only use RMSD even that’s not bulletproof but anecdotally it’s better than the piratical private carriers like evri and their ilk.
Helpful to know and thanks for sharing! I've faced issues with FedEx and TNT in the past - awful experiences and I swore never to use either again. Good to know the law has been tightened in favour of the consumer.
Well Fate is ever-vigilant: a headphone amplifier I ordered from the US took just two days to get from California to Stanstead, where it has since vanished into FedEx's maw for the last week. FedEx are - so far - predictably hugely unhelpful...
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