Courier Letting You Down or Gone Under? How to Get Your Deliveries Moving Again

Late collections, missing parcels, no-one answering the phone. Or worse, your courier has stopped trading altogether. Your customers do not care whose fault it is; they just want their order. This is what to do, in order, to protect your customers and get moving again.

Step 1: Find out exactly where your parcels are

Before anything else, list what is currently in the network: parcels collected but not delivered, parcels still waiting for collection at your premises and parcels already booked for later in the week. Pull tracking for each and sort them into three groups: delivered, in transit and stuck. That list is what you will use to talk to your customers and to your new provider.

Step 2: Stop feeding the problem

If collections have stopped or have become unreliable, stop booking new work with that carrier. Keep any parcels still at your premises, and check your account terms for how to claim for loss or damage. If the courier has gone into administration, contact the appointed administrators about parcels still in the network, since they will usually set out a process for collecting or tracing goods. Take photos and keep records of what was handed over and when.

Step 3: Tell your customers early

Customers forgive delays far more readily than silence. Send a short, honest message to anyone whose order is affected: what has happened, what you are doing and when they will hear from you next. If an order is badly delayed, re-sending from stock by a different service is often the quickest way to save the sale and the review.

Step 4: Get an emergency carrier in place today

You do not need to find a perfect long-term provider before you can ship again. For urgent or high-value parcels, a dedicated same-day courier can collect today and deliver direct to the recipient, anywhere in the UK. For regular volume, overnight and next-day parcel services can be set up quickly, with collections from your premises. Use the urgent option for the orders that cannot wait and the parcel network for everything else.

Step 5: Do not swap one single point of failure for another

The deeper lesson from a courier failure is the risk of depending on a single carrier. Whichever route you take, look for a setup that gives you more than one option, so a problem at one carrier does not stop your business. Reilly's runs multi-carrier fulfilment through DespatchLab, which connects to carriers including Royal Mail, DPD, DHL, InPost, UKMail and more, so orders can be routed by service level and move to another carrier if one is struggling.

Step 6: Consider handing over the whole process

If you are an online seller packing orders yourself and fighting courier problems on top of everything else, this can be the moment to outsource. With 3PL fulfilment your stock is stored, picked, packed and shipped by a warehouse that handles carriers every day, so a single courier problem becomes the warehouse's job, not yours.

Questions to ask any replacement courier

• Do you collect from my premises, and at what times?
• What tracking and proof of delivery do you provide?
• What happens if a parcel is lost or damaged, and how do I claim?
• Can you handle urgent same-day jobs as well as routine parcels?
• Is there a real person I can phone when something goes wrong?

Frequently asked questions