Our shipping service is constantly evolving.
After 16 years of shipping more than 800,000 parcels around Australia, we have developed deep levels of experience for what it takes to ensure parcels arrive promptly and without incident.
Parcel logistics in Australia is a constantly moving target. No single provider is perfect.
We monitor and review our shipping offers to ensure that we are providing both reliability and value to our customers.
There will be changes from time to time as we adjust according to the prevailing conditions. These changes are driven by reducing risks of incidents for deliveries to our customers.
Nobody wants to experience a delivery incident. It's frustrating, expensive and damaging. It also destroys loyalty.
In a perfect world, shipping would be both fast and affordable. However, it's not easy in a climate of rising costs and limited capacity with increases in volumes of cargo moving through parcel networks.
In mid-2017 we introduced Sendle as an alternative shipping option to Australia Post.
Sendle uses a matrix of couriers to deliver around Australia. For us it has been mainly Couriers Please and Fastway/Aramex.
In some instances, Sendle provides a cheaper pricing option. This is particularly true for many of our remote customers in capital cities such as QLD, NT and WA.
However, this cheap pricing from Sendle for long-distance segments has often been offset with frustratingly slow transit time. It's annoying for our customers and also for us as it often leads to a complaint.
That's never good for you and it's certainly not good for us. Shipping incidents should be avoided.
Sendle has been able to gain a speed advantage over AusPost during the last few years of surging volumes during the pandemic.
This has been noticeable in many of our popular freight segments such as metro areas for Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane.
Overall, we have seen great examples of exceptionally fast delivery performance from Sendle. Mostly, this has been thanks to excellent service from Couriers Please.
During the pandemic from March 2020 until December 2021, there was a clear performance advantage for Sendle over Australia Post in terms of delivery time frames.
Of course, this can be easily explained as Australia Post being the much larger, dominant provider that suffers more from the impact of being constantly overloaded with extreme volumes, resulting in frustrating, long delays for recipients.
During lock downs in the pandemic, Sendle and their courier partners were more nimble and able to enact delivery faster.
But nothing is ever perfect.
Shipping does suffer delays outside of our control.
We roast, pack and ship parcels extremely fast.
But there are times throughout the year - such as public holidays, school holidays, big sale periods like Cyber Monday, Black Friday and Click Frenzy, Mothers Day, Fathers Day where inevitable delays occur in the national parcel networks.
Delays occur when higher parcel volumes are jammed into the networks and result in slower transit time frames.
Unfortunately, our 5 years of experience with Sendle has never been easy or free of incidents.
In fact there have been many moments when our frustration levels have boiled over and we switched off Sendle to protect our customers and our business.
Incident rates with Sendle are 900% higher than AusPost. Yep, I bet that caught your attention and no, it's not exaggeration.
What's really difficult when you sit down and assess Sendle is that for the most part their performance is great, e.g. fast.
Yet, with this speed comes with problems such as failure to deliver in multi-tenanted premises (apartments, townhouses, businesses, etc). Sendle's couriers are not permitted to leave parcels at the local Post Office.
A persistent level of high failure rates, particularly last mile has caused us (and our customers) too much pain.
After 5 years of trying to fix all these issues with Sendle, we arrived at the conclusion Sendle is not enterprise grade.
It can't support large retailers like us and therefore becomes a serious risk to our business reputation if we continued to use Sendle with high incident rates.
We now have direct access to a large, high capacity AusPost DWS facility. This is located in our neighborhood and means we lodge directly to a special facility which reduces average transit times by 1 and 2 days. This is a game-changer and improves our transit time performance by around 100%.
Sendle remains disabled and not available on our JustFreshRoasted store due to ongoing problems dealing with Fastway/Aramex that have been reported numerous times to Sendle and still unresolved.
