First, I would like to say that I specifically booted up my secure machine, logged on and made this post to call out the poster of the other USPS domestic thread. I very seriously doubt that the OP of that post has the experience to make such claims.
As someone who has sent thousands of packages through USPS priority mail, most of them containing illegal goods, I would like to share some observations/experience/statistics I have kept in hopes that the community will be better informed. Note, everything written here should be taken as information pertaining to priority mail.
- What part of the US you are in compared to the vendor has almost no effect on delivery time. Unless you are in the same sorting hub as the vendor (for those of you unfamiliar, these hubs usually reside in the closest large metro complex, some larger US cities have two, I believe NYC has three plus a separate one for inbound customs), your location makes almost no difference.
- A vendor's relative distance from his/her sorting hub makes a HUGE difference in their shipping speed. I am going to use HoS as an example because his/her profile gives most of this information out. HoS blue boxes their packages, usually in different areas in the region, some of which are very rural. As such HoS has developed a reputation of having slow shipping, even when a package has been marked shipped. On the other hand, a vendor who tends to blue box in an urban area, closer to their hub is more likely to have their package hit the hub within the same day.
- Over 95% of packages are delivered in exactly 2 days once they have hit their sorting hub. It is fairly rare for a package to be delivered on any day other than the second business day after it is scanned in at the nearest hub.
- Packages that hit the hub on either Friday or Saturday will be delivered Monday. Sunday technically counts if the package has already hit a hub. Nothing will be delivered Sunday (obviously), nothing will go towards a hub on Sunday, but it does appear that mail will move to your local distribution center on Sunday.
At this point you may ask yourself, why is there so much variance in shipping speed then?
- I would assume that a large amount of vendors rush to get packages into blueboxes before the cutoff times, sometimes blue boxes are not picked up. This is especially true in areas/towns further away from sorting hubs. Even if they are picked up, a truck may not come to get it from the post office holding it to take it to the hub until that post office calls and says they need one.
- Vendors will mark massive amounts of orders shipped because they do not remember which sets of order batches went into boxes on which drop run. Although some customers may find this dishonest, it is actually better this way (if a vendor is able to distinguish which orders did not get dropped in time, that means they kept something linking your address to your order which in my mind is a HUGE opsec violation)
- Finally, USPS is not at all reliable from a consistency standpoint (although they are EXTREMELY reliable from a delivery standpoint).
Note, the following statistics are taken from my encrypted records I use for tracking. No customer addresses, information, or anything else that can tie a customer to an order is stored with this information. Full tracking numbers are deleted three weeks after an order has been placed. Customer user names (only the first and last two characters) are stored via a cypher within the encrypted file that I decode in my head. Tracking information is only pulled four business days after I expect the package to have been postmarked and only if a customer requests it (except during one USPS snafu, where I was randomly pulling from about 75 orders). I do not act, give out or notate a tracking event unless 8 business days have passed. Thus, I would not treat the data below as a complete picture since there is a chance that tracking was never pulled if a customer never voiced a concern.
Of the 2341 packages I have shipped to date:
- 0 known seizures
- 71 tracking requests that I have filled and acted on, 4 requests that I was unable to fill (lost the number, request came after I deleted tracking x 2, evo crash caused me to be unable to link the request to my tracking sheet)
- 53 packages that customers claimed were undelivered after the 8th business day
- Of those 53, 31 were marked delivered 8 were undeliverable as addressed.
I am a relatively trusting person, I only believe to have been on the receiving end of a scam 3 times of those 31. So, if your package has not arrived, chances are it was delivered and either your postman, roommate, parents etc. stole it or trashed it.
That leaves 14 packages unaccounted for. Of these:
- 2 tracking numbers never pulled data
- 2 stopped dead after hitting my hub. This tracking pull is the only one that concerns me. In my mind, it is the only tracking set that indicates a possible seizure.
- 10 were caught in USPS limbo Of the 10:
- 3 were (probably) forwarded to the wrong sorting station because someone fat fingered a zip code or the customer put a city that did not match the zip, continuously had tracking updates and the customer eventually got them.
- 5 went dead somewhere along the line, usually 2-3 days slower in the process than it should have been. I always take this to mean that the package fell off a belt or a tray or something and is sitting in that post office. 2 of my customers actually messaged me claiming to have gotten these (perhaps after someone picks it up off the ground?). I believe this is the explanation for people getting packages weeks after Evo closed.
- 2 were forwarded after going out for delivery. One got stuck in a loop and then stopped updating. The other was returned to sender after it was forwarded.
There you have it: 90%+ of packages should land within 2-3 days for a vendor who routinely ships close to a major hub (give them one extra day in case they miss a box pickup time). 95% of packages should land within five business days. Cut vendors 1-2 days slack on the exact day they marked shipped as they could confuse which ones were shipped that day or could have dropped into a box USPS failed to pick up. About 3% of packs are claimed undelivered, of these most are marked delivered by USPS. Only .6% of packages (mine at least) could have been seized, more likely lost due to USPS sorting.
That being said, USPS does experience delays sometimes. Heavy shipping periods can cause hubs to lag up to two days for package intake (once scanned in, they still get delivered in two days). One period of shipping was eliminated from this data, during which a hub that a number of my packages went through seemed to break entirely. A lot of packages got scanned in from hubs in different states, some never got scanned and customers still finalized, and a solid 60% of my order batches from that 5 day period landed past the first week. This occurrence has only happened once since I started vending, if a vendor claims this routinely happens they're lying; however, understand that sorting through the shitshow of tracking down that many orders was extremely stressful, so do not bury a vendor if there is a chance that they're actually losing packs.
Finally, reasons vendors do not like giving out tracking numbers:
1) It creates an unreasonable customer support load on a vendor
2) It adds a lot of additional stress if we are paranoid that our customer's packs are not landing
3) It would allow LE to flag the number being scanned in which could allow them to flag all sequential tracking numbers (tracking numbers are not randomized, they're built to look that way but there is a distinct pattern, one that I assume was intentionally used to obscure the fact that USPS can pull tracking from the same roll). Releasing a tracking number to a customer when the majority of the packages from that order batch are still in the system could significantly increase the chances of other customers receiving CDs. Since packages are not normally scanned until they reach the hub, it theoretically does not threaten the vendor, it could definitely lead to another customer from the same order batch having their package pulled.
4) Even if they were not able to pull the packages in time to conduct CDs, it would allow them to get the package fronts from a number of other order drops. All of these images would allow LE to build a package/shipping profile faster which directly harms the vendor.
In other words, stop asking for tracking, any vendor that gives it to you is an idiot and is endangering their customers. Please destroy our tracking labels when you get them.
I'll stick around for a bit if anyone has questions. Stim
That's a lot of info that I really think people need to know. Thank you for typing this all out.