Are Evri really that bad?

anonuk

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Feb 27, 2014
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Currentlt, we use Royal Mail for all parcels under 2kg and DHL Parcel UK for anthing above. I'm getting more and more frustrated with Royal Mail, especially the fact that for the past 9 months, it's been cheaper to buy RM48 tracked from RM's website than we pay for RM48 untracked through our business account. We spend enough to qualify for free collections, but our per parcel price is shocking.

RM48 Tracked on regular RM site: £2.74+vat
RM48 Untracked on our Business account: £3.02+vat
RM24 Tracked on regular RM site: £3.33+vat
RM24 Untracked on our Business account: £4.14+vat

Anyway, this has got me shopping around and I'm wondering whether it's time to give Evri a go. We've been using Evri for our long but light parcels as they are cheaper than anyone else. We send around 10 per week and not had any issues as yet. What that will translate to if we went to 200+ parcels a week is anyones guess.

Evri have offered us the following rates based on more than 130 parcels per month (up to 3499 parcels per month):
Next Day: £3.41+vat
Two Day/Standard: £2.45+vat

DPD have also offered us £4+surcharge+vat per 1kg parcel but that would still work out a fair bit more than we can currently pay RM for RM24 tracked so I don't think it's viable.

Would love to hear from people that actually use Evri at the moment or anyone with any recent experiences of Evri.
 

japancool

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    Evri haven't changed their model since they were Hermes, and the problem I always had was parcel damage. They get squashed into some guy's car below other parcels, who's in a hurry to get his deliveries done and doesn't take care.

    The last Evri parcel I had was left in someone's bin three streets away.
     
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    14Steve14

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    Until recently Evri was the only courier with a drop off in our small town. During November last year we used Evri for all of our deliveries just to see if it was a viable alternative to RM. We were sending on average about 35 parcels a day ranging from large letter size up to small parcels under 10kg and either be next day or standard. Where possible we always used a service where a signature was required. Daily, the costs were cheaper compared to RM over the counter prices that we were paying.

    To be honest we had something like 5 parcels a week either not be delivered, be delivered to the wrong address, or in one case be delivered back to us with no delivery attempt made to the customer. Daily we would check the tracking to make sure that things were going well, and in most cases things did go well. When things went wrong we had so much trouble getting through on the phones and the online chatbot was next to useless. We put in so many compensation claims for the lost or late delivery items we finally decided not to bother, and just accept the losses. It may be different with high volumes and an account manager.

    We did find that customers loved the tracking feature and many would check their parcels location. They also loved the time slot deliveries, even though in many cases parcels would either be delivered late or not until the following day, with no reasons given. The tracking left a lot to be desired and lots of times no signature was obtained, or the parcel was left somewhere when it should not have been. Some of the proof of delivery photos showed nothing apart from the parcel sat on the floor. No real proof.

    As an experiment we kept with it, but decided that the sorting out of the problems was far too much trouble and took up too much time. Yes, it was when RM were striking, and yes it was in the run up to Christmas, but to be honest, never again. We went back to RM and only use Evri for the heavier parcels we now send.
     
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    fisicx

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    As a customer it’s all good. Never had a parcel go missing. But that’s probably down to the driver rather than Evri.
     
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    anonuk

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    Feb 27, 2014
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    Until recently Evri was the only courier with a drop off in our small town. During November last year we used Evri for all of our deliveries just to see if it was a viable alternative to RM. We were sending on average about 35 parcels a day ranging from large letter size up to small parcels under 10kg and either be next day or standard. Where possible we always used a service where a signature was required. Daily, the costs were cheaper compared to RM over the counter prices that we were paying.

    To be honest we had something like 5 parcels a week either not be delivered, be delivered to the wrong address, or in one case be delivered back to us with no delivery attempt made to the customer. Daily we would check the tracking to make sure that things were going well, and in most cases things did go well. When things went wrong we had so much trouble getting through on the phones and the online chatbot was next to useless. We put in so many compensation claims for the lost or late delivery items we finally decided not to bother, and just accept the losses. It may be different with high volumes and an account manager.

    We did find that customers loved the tracking feature and many would check their parcels location. They also loved the time slot deliveries, even though in many cases parcels would either be delivered late or not until the following day, with no reasons given. The tracking left a lot to be desired and lots of times no signature was obtained, or the parcel was left somewhere when it should not have been. Some of the proof of delivery photos showed nothing apart from the parcel sat on the floor. No real proof.

    As an experiment we kept with it, but decided that the sorting out of the problems was far too much trouble and took up too much time. Yes, it was when RM were striking, and yes it was in the run up to Christmas, but to be honest, never again. We went back to RM and only use Evri for the heavier parcels we now send.
    Thanks for this, it’s really handy to have someone’s perspective that’s used them.

    Our problem is that if we want to offer Amazon ‘Prime’ while shipping from our warehouse, we are stuck with either Royal Mail (need to use Tracked24), DPD or Evri, and it has to be purchased through amazons website.

    I’m trying to find out what DPD fees are via Amazon, but the Royal Mail prices go off our negotiated rates so it would depend on whether we can negotiate good enough rates with them. Unfortunately many of our products are around the £12 price point so DPD might be out of the question 99% of the time.

    I’ve only ever had one customer say she wouldn’t have ordered it she knew we were going to use Evri, but as I say, we send very few parcels with Evri at the moment but I do worry that if reviews started mentioning Evri, it might warn people off, and boy do Amazon customers love an excuse to leave poor reviews haha.
     
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    anonuk

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    there have been negative reviews and complaints about Evri's customer service, account management, or technical issues. It's important to conduct thorough research, read customer reviews, and consider various factors before making a decision about using Evri's services or any other financial institution. Additionally, reaching out to Evri directly to clarify any concerns or questions can provide further insights into their offerings and help you make an informed decision.
    Are you just trying to improve your post count?

    Firstly, Evri are not a financial institution, secondly, people largely tend to post ‘reviews’ when things go bad and not so much when things go well (as an example, we get an average of 100 orders per day on Amazon, and have done for the past 4 years. That’s a minimum of 146,000 orders. Of those, only 1,471 have ever left feedback (though thankfully, mostly good feedback).

    Thirdly, if you think any company the size of Evri is going to be honest and admit to messing up when approached with concerns about negative reviews etc, you’re sadly mistaken, let alone they likely wont even be able to go into any detail about complaints relating to other customers due to gdpr.
     
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    MBE2017

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    Not in the parcel game anymore, but a few friends who are have generally been giving Ervi reasonable to good feedback, compared to their performance standards of a year or two ago.

    A huge outfit dealing at the budget end of parcel carriers, who will always be used due to the excellent rates they offer. With such a huge number of parcels daily, you will always hear plenty of poor feedback, but generally I believe they have improved a bit.

    Its hard to lose a bad name.
     
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    JEREMY HAWKE

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    I don't rate Evri any worse than the RM .
    The biggest mistake you can make is using historic reputation to make your choice .
    Recently there has been complaints of the RM proof of delivery just being photos of things that nobody even recognises
     
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    paulears

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    Jan 7, 2015
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    I have numerous evri deliveries and have no issues with them whatsoever, and if I'm not here they manage do get them delivered. No compaints at all. RM is variable, and frankly, when they mess up - as in the one that has been showing as in their system for two months, their compaints system is pathetic. I sent document after document proving how much I paid for the item (as they won't cover me for what I sold it for, which I refunded) and they even said that being in their tracking system is NOT proof of posting.

    I would happily use EVRI for sending, but UPS collect from next door., Post Office is two minutes and the nearest EVRI point is too far away.
     
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    DPD have also offered us £4+surcharge+vat per 1kg parcel but that would still work out a fair bit more than we can currently pay RM for RM24 tracked so I don't think it's viable.

    DPD are my current bete noir as either the company or it's local driver are dishonest.

    I bought a laptop on Ebay that turned out to be faulty so the supplier said that he would arrange for DPD to collect it. Twice they didn't turn up but allegedly charged the supplier. The third time he included my phone number so that I could track the collection and I tracked it from being number 72 down to 60 then down to 40 then "item was collected at 3:15" which was a lie as it was still sitting in my living room.

    The supplier was none too pleased and arranged yet another collection and yet again I watched the collection tracked down to about 30 then the very same "item was collected at ...."

    Someone is being grossly dishonest
     
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    anonuk

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    The problem is customer perception.

    The box arrives crushed (as it often does with Evri), the customer blames you fot using a crap courier. If it arrives crushed with RM, they blame RM.

    RM's Tracked 24/48 is quite competitive.
    Sorry, I've been away so not been on here for a bit.

    Our current RM24/48 UNTRACKED prices are higher than consumers currently pay for RM24/48 TRACKED. Our RM24 Tracked rate at present is £4.78+surcharge+vat which comes to £6.20 (for a 500g small parcel). The EVRI next day rate we've been offered is £3.46+vat so £4.15.
     
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    Nico Albrecht

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    Our current RM24/48 UNTRACKED prices are higher than consumers currently pay for RM24/48 TRACKED
    The pricing for RM appears to be quite high on your end After reviewing our click and drop service for RM 24 tracked 500g small parcel size, I found that the one-time cost is 3.33 plus VAT ( 500g SP), which also includes complimentary collection.

    Why would you as a volume business customer pay 43% more than my one off ?
     
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    anonuk

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    The pricing for RM appears to be quite high on your end After reviewing our click and drop service for RM 24 tracked 500g small parcel size, I found that the one-time cost is 3.33 plus VAT ( 500g SP), which also includes complimentary collection.

    Why would you as a volume business customer pay 43% more than my one off ?

    Curious. We send less than you and our prices are lower.
    For business customers, RM base their prices on how much you use a given service I believe. So, because most of what we send is RM24/48 untracked, that volume doesn’t have any influence on our Tracked rates.

    We have stressed with RM that the rates you can get as a consumer are much better than what we have ever been offered and that we are genuinely considering jumping ship. I’m currently waiting for a quote back from RM and to see what level of commitment they require.

    Coming up to Christmas, we are fully expecting to be sending upto 200 parcels per day. If RM want that business, they’re gonna have to fight for it this year because last year proved they don’t give a rats about their business customers.
     
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    LPB 123

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    For business customers, RM base their prices on how much you use a given service I believe. So, because most of what we send is RM24/48 untracked, that volume doesn’t have any influence on our Tracked rates.

    We have stressed with RM that the rates you can get as a consumer are much better than what we have ever been offered and that we are genuinely considering jumping ship. I’m currently waiting for a quote back from RM and to see what level of commitment they require.

    Coming up to Christmas, we are fully expecting to be sending upto 200 parcels per day. If RM want that business, they’re gonna have to fight for it this year because last year proved they don’t give a rats about their business customers.
    The price we have is £2.99 + surcharge + VAT for 48 tracked. Minimum 10,000 parcels per year on tracked services (RM24/48 Tracked and Tracked Returns). I think it used to be £3.15 + surcharge + VAT for minimum 5,000 parcels per year.

    I think this is still more expensive than personal customers and the only advantage I can see is you get average weight so can send parcels up to 20kg for same price as long as average weight is still below 1kg. Apart from that the only option is to switch to Evri which we can never pull the trigger on as I do think RM provide a better service so just have to suck up the prices.

    For your untracked parcels you should be getting the 5% discount if you send 20+ parcels a day on the same service. There's another discount at 100 parcels per day but not sure what it is as we never send that amount on untracked parcels.
     
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    Russ Michaels

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    Thanks for this, it’s really handy to have someone’s perspective that’s used them.

    Our problem is that if we want to offer Amazon ‘Prime’ while shipping from our warehouse, we are stuck with either Royal Mail (need to use Tracked24), DPD or Evri, and it has to be purchased through amazons website.

    I’m trying to find out what DPD fees are via Amazon, but the Royal Mail prices go off our negotiated rates so it would depend on whether we can negotiate good enough rates with them. Unfortunately many of our products are around the £12 price point so DPD might be out of the question 99% of the time.

    I’ve only ever had one customer say she wouldn’t have ordered it she knew we were going to use Evri, but as I say, we send very few parcels with Evri at the moment but I do worry that if reviews started mentioning Evri, it might warn people off, and boy do Amazon customers love an excuse to leave poor reviews haha.
    Evri changed their name from hermes in an attempt to get away from their terrible reputation and bad reviews. They were nicknamed herpes they are so bad.

    All the drivers are freelance, so it's basically like hiring a bunch of strangers to delivery your parcels.
    Evri aka hermes treat drivers like crap and pay them peanuts, they penalize them off they take to long to deliver a parcel and are paid according to how many they deliver and how quick.
    Evri simply do not care about anyone, or customer service or the parcels and will hire anyone and don't care if those drivers are total scumbags.

    This why so many just dump parcels in the bin or their them over the fence off just steal them.

    so it's really just luck ad to who the drivers are. Thankfully my local evri driver seems to be decent and we never had any issues.

    i never had any issues with dpd great tracking, nice drivers. Both sending and receiving.
     
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    CeeVee

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    Used Evri for hundreds of parcels and never had any go missing or be damaged. Items ranged from second hand caravan parts to insect mesh.
    I use them because I once sent a large caravan window with RM and it arrived like someone had put their boot through it. Sent a replica item through Evri with no such issues.
     
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    anonuk

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    Just thought I'd update the thread to say that RM have offered us some insanely good rates so we will stick with RM for now. I'm not allowed to discuss the rates apparently, but let's just say that the price we've been given for Tracked 24 is now cheaper than we were sending untracked 48.
     
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    Mister B

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    Just thought I'd update the thread to say that RM have offered us some insanely good rates so we will stick with RM for now. I'm not allowed to discuss the rates apparently, but let's just say that the price we've been given for Tracked 24 is now cheaper than we were sending untracked 48.
    That's good news, well done you.

    We're in a similar position but struggling to get through to the right team. Our "account manager," is currently away.

    Any pointers as to where we may request a revision of the prices that we pay?

    TIA
     
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    NatalieRob

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    I’ve found in my area(Aberdeen) that Evri’s service is non existent and I’ve never had a parcel delivered when a company has used them. In some places in the UK when I have used them to send items to customers it seems the service is what you pay for and others like my area, it’s terrible. I think RM are the better option as at least you can speak to someone if things go wrong. The Evri chat is extremely frustrating.
     
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    I have accounts with all the major couriers except Evri only down to previous reputational damage for our fulfilment clients. We do, however, have a collection by Evri utilising our client's accounts and they 'for the most part' have no worst to say about the service than Royal Mail, Parcelforce or Yodel.

    As others have mentioned, customer service is a challenge and processing a successful claim when it does go wrong is near on impossible I hear.
     
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    japancool

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    As others have mentioned, customer service is a challenge and processing a successful claim when it does go wrong is near on impossible I hear.

    In fairness to them, when they were Hermes, I found their claims process fairly easy, much easier than Royal Mail. There were just too many of them.

    They kept trying to bill me for oversized parcels, which could not have happened, since I use standard sized parcel boxes. I never paid any of them.
     
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    Melanie.

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    Hi anonuk.

    I deal with multiple couriers in my day to day and my actual figures for Evri damage claims (based on about 70k parcels per year) is less than 1%.

    Their claims process can be lengthy in terms of waiting for a response (initial response is 48 hours) and their customer service advisors are a bit robotic, but providing you've used adequate packaging, most are accepted without a problem. They cover up to £20 so based on your average weight and price point I think they would suit you. To manage your expectations I would say if something does go wrong you won't receive a payout until about two weeks after you submit a claim form.

    I understand that you're restricted in terms of courier options but it might be worth giving them a go to see how they compare? You can always switch back if you're not happy. As I think someone else mentioned, it largely depends on the individual driver.

    I think customer perception is the main problem when it comes to courier services but that said, the playing field has leveled more recently.

    Edit: just read the update about your new rates - I would stick with RM then! Evri's main benefit is usually low price but if RM can match that then maybe stick with them for the time being?

    Melanie
     
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    Danny Whitaker-Leach

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    That's good news, well done you.

    We're in a similar position but struggling to get through to the right team. Our "account manager," is currently away.

    Any pointers as to where we may request a revision of the prices that we pay?

    TIA

    I’m in the same position, any pointers as to how to get through to the right people at Royal Mail would be great!
     
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    Bookseller

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    Not had many issues with Evri. Had some lovely drivers in more than one part of the UK. To the person who says parcels get put underneath piles of other parcels in a car, surely Royal Mail put all their stuff in sacks which probably get thrown?

    Now Yodel, that's another matter altogether; my experience would lead me to avoid completely. Makes me wonder, why did people vote Evri the worst courier, in a recent survey? Is it just that they don't get enough parcels via Yodel to realise how bad they are? Or is my experience much worse than the national situation?

    I use Royal Mail for all my outgoing parcels.
     
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    japancool

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    Not had many issues with Evri. Had some lovely drivers in more than one part of the UK. To the person who says parcels get put underneath piles of other parcels in a car, surely Royal Mail put all their stuff in sacks which probably get thrown?

    I've never had a crushed parcel with RM. Had other issues.

    With Evri, it's a lottery - it depends on your local driver (and the driver at the other end). Some are good, some are useless.
     
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    User_Name_2

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    My story from today:

    I am not writing here asking for anything, it is just for your information, to add one more topic to never ending EVRI stories. They left 3 parcels outside of my building today, right next to a busy road, and were smart enough to take a photo of it as proof of delivery.

    List of losses:
    1) OnePlus 12 -490$
    2) A watch - 58$
    3) A strap for a watch - around 5$

    So far Aliexpress was always on my side when I opened a dispute, however this time it is about the most expensive item I ever bought, so will see. If they don't give me my money back, it will be my last purchase on Aliexpress. And I will never buy anything that is delivered by EVRI, so write your stories everywhere ladies and gents, and maybe one day eBay, Ali etc. will get rid of that scam courier.

    Unfortunatelly I know I lost it 100%, because I found empty bags on the road on the other side of the building with my name on them... I can't even open a dispute with EVRI, as it needs to be done by the person that send it...
     
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    paulears

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    The reality seems to be they're all as good or bad as each other. My safe place is NOT on my front doorstep, open to the road and passers by in the rain. All are excellent with the usual drivers, less good with new people doing the same round. It's a lottery. For sending I was Royal Mail, then UPS, now back to RM, but loads of deliveries come via them all.
     
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    fantheflames

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    Agree with @paulears - there's problems with all the providers from a business or customer point of view, whether it's getting in touch with them, prices, or something happening to orders. What others said about it being a lottery on the drivers and people you have, I think is correct! RM is very reliable from a business pov, but I know businesses that use Evri that would never move and very happy with it, but as a customer I'd had a couple of problems with Evri. The price isn't a huge difference, but if you wanted to give it a go, then do it. You might hit the jackpot :)
     
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    paulears

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    Good job it wasn't bin day! I was using UPS, collection point next door - £4.99 for most of my parcels. Then it went to £5.99, and UPS has no Saturday collection and often Monday collection is too early for me to get Friday-sunday sales boxed up and packaged in time. I went to Royal Mail - tracked 24 is £4.19 - and usually not too bad - but a couple of parcels have been severely delayed, so much so that a replacement sent out arrives first, then the customer wants reimbursing for the return of the duplicate! Often the tracking doesn't work. The post office take it and it shows nothing until it shows delivered.
     
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