Marketplace
After seemingly reaching a dead end with all my possible options, I'm turning to the next best thing. Ranting on OzBargain!
Short story short, I made 3 orders on AliExpress in the space of 2 weeks (nothing new here). AliExpress have joined Temu in using Fast Horse Express (FHE) as the courier in my work place's postcode.
First package was stuck at the 'MelDC-1' for 10 days, then turned to undelivered, please contact support. 'Contact us' on the FHE website takes you to what seems like live chat, but it only has one response which pretty much says sorry, email us.
Emailing them isn't any better, there is auto reply with a bit of delay that says 'We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the unsuccessful delivery of your package due to [return].' The system doesn't even populate the reason on there 🤦♂️. It just proceeds to say that the package is going back to the sender.
Trying to contact AliExpress is more of the same. I can't seem to be able to get past their useless 'AI' chatbot to talk to a human. And even though it has been about a month since that first order and we are past the expected delivery date, the refund option is inactive and says its in transit (yet the AI bot says delivery failed..)
I just saw that the second package meet the same fate, with some more info this time. 'Delivery attempt failure,Address is unknown / wrong' which comes up immediately after the package hit the warehouse. My workplace is one of those places that the different address APIs disagree about, is it 'level 3, 65 Fake street' or is it '65C Fake Street' or '3/65 Fake Street'. It is different everywhere but none the less all the packages arrive properly, even my previous orders from AliExpress/FHE. But now it seems FHE changed a portion of their internal processing that simply auto rejects package when its not happy with the address and there is simply no way to contact them to do anything about it.
Something tells me the third package will meet the same fate.
All ideas, rants, other deliver horror stories are welcome!
TL;DR - Fast Horse Express (who are not fast but potentially run by horse like creatures (read: asses)) have started auto rejecting packages with non-standard addresses and sending them back to sender (AliExpress). There is virtually no way around the automated 'contact us' replies that tell me in no uncertain terms, that its more likely for me to marry Taylor Swift than to see my packages or money again.
My first dealing with Fast Horses recently was a disaster. I saw a package coming from them, looked them up, and my stomach sank. Absolutely scathing reviews.
Needless to say I was met with the same fate as many reviewers. My package was due to arrive one day but out of nowhere it was simply sent back to the seller with no reason or communication.
I messaged the seller and made it clear that if they used this service I would take my business elsewhere.
They stated this courier was "under investigation"
Nothing will come of it though, it's a cheap service that they will continue to use unless more people complain and they start to lose business.