Jonathan's blog

I bought a BluRay-ROM drive for my media PC this week, and so I decided to bump-start my collection of BluRays.

I dredged through the bargain movies at Play.com and ordered ten of them.

Much was my surprise when they started arriving today and I discovered that they were individually wrapped!

I can’t understand how they can possibly save money by using ten cardboard packets and ten orders with the courier. It seems to me to be more efficient to pick the ten discs in the warehouse, put them in one box and post the box off.

Not to mention the cost to the environment (or perhaps more importantly, perceived cost).

As someone who frequently makes online purchases, I am a frequent user of courier services. But on this occasion, the seller that I bought from used a courier that I haven’t experienced before – Interlink Express. And I have to say, they’ve done everything right. I am impressed by their level of service, and I think other couriers should follow suit. It’s not exactly rocket science – it’s taking care of the little things.

Firstly, they sent me an email the day before my parcel was due to arrive. This is really handy, as it gives me time to make arrangements to be at home – rather than the usual scenario where it turns up without warning and oh – I’m at work. Commence long drive at inconvenient time to wherever their depot is.

They also sent me an email on the day to let me know the parcel was on the van.

I was also impressed by their online order tracking. It seems to me that most couriers who offer this service have very vague entries such as “Dispatched” and nobody is quite sure what this means. They also never seem to update their status. City Link are pretty bad at this – once I received a parcel from them and for days afterwards it still claimed it was on the van.

Interlink Express provide detailed information on their tracking page and seems to be updated promptly. Of course there’s no excuse for it not to be, in the age of barcodes, databases and PDAs. But it makes a nice change nonetheless.

Here’s what their tracking page says about my order:

When it arrived, I was asked to sign on a touchscreen PDA, and was delighted to find that within a couple of minutes the tracking information had been updated. This is how it’s supposed to work