I just noticed in the course of a spare part order that I was given the option to have my order shipped either to a UPS pickup location (4.95 Euros in Germany) or to my house address (8.95 Euros in Germany). The pickup option is a novelty, and I think it wasn’t available just 14 days ago.
I hope the new pickup option remains available now as it makes things so much easier for someone like me who’s living in a building complex that has kept driving delivery workers into despair for years …
I briefly checked and found that this is also possible in the Netherlands (at slightly lower rates), but not in Austria.
I also have some experiences with postal workers dropping a note in a postbox (shared with 4 other people) that a parcel had been delivered at a neighbour, without writing the recipient’s name on the note, so we didn’t know whose parcel it was .
As far as I know, this has not really gone wrong while I lived there. Nevertheless I’d have liked it if my Fairphone had been handed to me at the UPS parcel point 5 minutes away instead of attempting delivery at a student dorm. (The flatmate who received my phone, later joked that he might have stolen it if he knew that it was a phone )
So that’s definitely a good development, and also environmentally friendly as it limits delivery vans in neighbourhoods!
By the way @urs_lesse I would suggest that you blur your telephone number in the screenshot.
I would prefer more user friendly carriers than UPS, which only works well for commercial recipients.
There are only a few pickup points in a big city like Cologne. And some of them have very bad user experiences.
You can pick any other carrier you want, there will always be somebody saying “Oh no! Not them! They are the worst at least where I live.”
It’s good to have options.
Apparently it is.
I wouldn’t choose them either, because it is my experience, too, that they are set up for business customers and don’t care about the private household “by-catch” at all, but since they are offered as an option we surely can let customers decide for themselves.
Here in Ulm there are plenty of pickup points to choose from, three of which within 1km of my home, so this is certainly not representative for all of Germany. And what do you mean with bad user experiences?
It is not an option if you want to send a single parcel as private customer, but it is if you are Fairphone and want to send large amounts of them from one specific warehouse in Eindhoven, NL.
For me its a vast improvement. The pickup location I chose is 2-2.5 km away, but it’s open 7 days a week 7-22 h (or even longer).
I’m not really a fan of this or that logistics company, for me it’s all about having a reasonable pickup location option at all. Remember before the FP3, Fairphone sent everything through DHL Express – and their nearest pickup location for Aachen was in Cologne (65-70 km).
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