Shipping Woes

Do you use DHL for your business? I have, and had lots of trouble with mis-billing. Everyone I know that has used them have shared their own horror stories.

Since last November I've been fighting DHL about a shipment of 4 boxes sent, 4 boxes received. What's hard about that? They are charging me for 16 boxes! Our representative from where the boxes were shipped from may have mislabled as 4 boxes per shipping label (4 labels) but wouldn't DHL have a clued as to how many physical boxes they actually handled? Apparently not! Not only that, but they automatically upgraded the ground shipping to overnight because of the number of boxes listed on each shipping label. Huh? Yup! Four stinking boxes cost me over $800!!!

Every month I call to straighten this out. I have gotten it knocked down to about half price, only $436, but this shipment should have only cost about $100. Every month I call, get transferred a few times, explain the situation about 3 times and am told that I will be credited and to wait 2-3 weeks for verification of the credit. Does it ever come? NO!

The latest with RSS shipments through DHL from over seas is that they lost 72 of our top end wetsuits for 2 weeks. Not only that, but once they found them, they shipped them from Californial, to Waco Tx (a 1 1/2 hour drive from it's Austin destination), only to be flown to Ohio,
split up and half sent back to Austin and the other half sent to California again. I am happy to say that we have finally received all the packages. Most of them are not in very good condition however. The outer boxes were torn, and some of the inner boxes were flattened and scraped up. Lucky for us the merchandise was squishy wetsuits, not something that would break from all the extra mishandling.

Now we are having more special customer deliveries shipped from our warehouse screwed up by DHL. Where does it end? My guess is when we ship through another company.

What good does great prices do you if you end up spending all your time tracking and managing what the heck DHL is doing with your packages? Our time is worth money isn't it? I think I'd rather pay a little extra and not worry about it then continue with DHL. What do you say? Join me in a strike against DHL? Let's go!

Happy shipping! Cheers!