Dear Payperdrop Users,
Payperdrop was set up in the Summer of 2006, to provide a discounted service to Ebay sellers.
It was started by myself after being an Ebay seller of electrical products.
After opening a Parcelforce account, I soon realised that the price I was paying could be pushed right down if I was moving 1000s of items instead of 10s.
I negotiated fantastic rates with DHL, who at this point had not broken into the Ebay market.
Those of you who have been on Ebay for a while will well remember carriers, such as Selective, Parcelsdirect2u and others, they ripped everyone off and also their suppliers.
We have pushed the price for Ebay customers to the limit and you may be suprised to hear that almost all other courier resellers on Ebay and also some websites, are buying from us.
Some of these people are not telling us that they are reselling and we are clamping down on in this area now, as its very difficult to settle a claim, if the buyer has not actually purchased from us directly.
We are still here and believe we are providing a service that is second-to-none.
This is certainly a fact within Ebay.
We now employ 13 people and deal with tens of thousands of deliveries per week.
All this within one year.
Our feedback is 60,000 positives and 260 negatives - this is actually a feedback score of 99.6 % over 12 months.
The feedback score is actually falling, because in September, Ebay ceased the trading of all Courier Services in the Buy-It-Now category.
We had no direct warning of this and had to take drastic action - including making a considerable investment in building the new website.
Anybody who is still selling courier services in Buy-It-Now on Ebay is in contravention of Ebay Selling Policies.
The website - www.payperdrop.com was put live, less than 6 weeks from inception.
Obviously, this has resulted in some teething problems, as we had to continue providing a service, whilst building the website - in other words, selling on the site at the same time. The site is still under construction and should be finished in the next week or two. We have now achieved Verisign Green status - which is the higest level of security - on a level with PayPal, for example. We also have data protection certification and credit card payment facilities will be going live shortly.
Subsequently, as we were unable to continue with our sales inside Ebay, our feedback score has frozen. A tiny minority of individuals with a grievance and some aspiring transport entrepreneurs, are giving negatives, knowing our weak position.
We have asked Ebay to investigate this and we have also requested that these be removed.
In response to the criticism about our handling of claims, may I say that we are merely a customer and not an official agent of the Carrier / DHL.
As we are moving alot of parcels, we have had to create our own claims department, internally, to work in conjunction with the carrier, as DHL have told us that we are putting a strain on their own claims department.
This has also been done becasue all claims must be submitted through us and not sent directly to DHL.
We simply mediate between the claimant and DHL in the case of a claim - and all decisions are made at the sole discretion of the carrier.
In recent months, there have been several issues regarding the level of service in the handling of customer claims.
DHL's average turnaround time on claims is approximately 4-8 weeks.
This is when they are in receipt of all requested documentation.
It can take even longer if the customer does not supply complete / correct information.
Correspondence from DHL Claims is usually sent by letter, this is the method of their choosing, which can also have a bearing on the time taken to finalise any claim.
We have never physically received any money form the carrier in settlement of claims.
Once the claim has been settled, we receive written notification of the decision made and confirmation of the settlement figure, where appropriate.
We then have to wait for a credit note to be issued by the DHL accounts department. Once we are in receipt of the credit note, then we are able to settle with the customer.
All in all, this process has been known to take up to 3 months !
We are not at all happy about this situation and can fully appreciate the frustration felt by claimants, having to wait for settlement, particularly after they have had to issue refunds themselves.
Neither are we happy that we have had to open our own claims department, at great expense. we have to shoulder the burden of administration costs, an expense that we did not foresee when PPD was established.
To all dissatisfied claimants :
Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience and distress that you may have suffered as a result of the handling of your claim.
In the New Year, PPD will be making some exciting changes to its service. This should improve service levels in many areas, especially claims.
Please bear in mind that damage or loss caused by DHL/PPD is in the region of 0.43% of all packages moved ( 4 in every thousand deliveries )
Also, in regards to being able to contact us by phone.
our numer is 0871 218 0506 this is manned by 3 - 4 people from 0800 til 1600 Mon to Fri. We attempt to answer as many calls as possible, but the very nature of what we do and the problems we come across, means that some phone calls can take 20+ minutes, also the bulk of our calls are from people wanting to know basic service information, that is actually available in the phone answering service - automatically by pressing the correct option.
We are taking on more staff to answer the calls, but at the end of the day we have to look at profit and we can only employ more people as we get costs under control.
Finallly, in relation to the subject of feedback - if you scratch beneath the surface of what would appear to be a poor performance over the last 2-3 months, you will see that the vast majority of negatives have been left in this period.
This is not representative of the quality of our service overall, as we have been independent of feedback for over two months now. It is for this reason that we set up Payperdrop_Express - this is a purely classified shop on Ebay.
We will never receive a negative or a positive within this shop, all we ask is that you try the service and find out for yourself why so many people come back time and time again to our site.
Thanks for your time in reading this message.
Regards
Mel
PPD Operations