Hi there,
Living in the UK and I don’t know if the UPS service in America is any good!
Here in the UK, It’s not the first time I have problem with them.
I’m since Monday (26 March 18) trying to receive my parcel with the Proofgrade materials!
Careless customer service, I was told since Monday that tomorrow your parcel will be there sir from at least 7 people already.
You cannot track the properly via the useless app, no time slot for delivery and careless drivers in a rush trying to deliver the overload of parcels they have!
DPD is great! you can live track your parcel and the customer service is just amazing (Previously experienced and people that had problems with them before (nobody is perfect)) said they handled it perfectly and thinking of the customer side in the first place!
Just a matter of curiosity to know if anyone in the UK had problems with them as well… AH! and trying to charge me AGAIN for the COD Fee that I’ve paid on Monday!
I’ve seen a lot of complaints from UK customers about UPS. They’re not perfect here in the US, and I’ve had an issue here and there over the years, but not as bad on a per capita complaint basis as I’ve been seeing on this forum.
The company I work for has used UPS-Germany a couple times for a trade show we attend there and they’ve been a total horror show. So bad we’ve honestly expected the hotel we use in Germany (and the people who bear the brunt of the awfulness) to say no thank you to our bookings.
UPS is bad in the United States, too. The only good thing about them is that they’re relatively inexpensive. But they lose or break things far more often than the competition.
There’s no DPD in the US and DHL ceased most of its US operations about ten years ago. (DHL was pretty good when they did operate here, though.)
Now we only have UPS and FedEx (and the post office). There are some smaller regional services (e.g., OnTrac for the western US) but if you need to deliver throughout the US the only choices are UPS, FedEx, and the post office.
Glowforge used FedEx for pre-release units but switched to UPS (probably to keep costs down) when they started shipping production units.
I worked for DHL for 4 years before they shut down our office here in Oklahoma City. Started as a PM courier and soon became the customs paperwork processor. Was a good company here, was sad when they shut down.
Since the postal service here in Austria is about as good as your experience with UPS seems to be I can’t complain. They did their job, got it when they said it would arrive (even arrived several hours early) and payment was OK too. But I know how frustrating that kind of “Service” is.
“Keep costs down” we are paying the cost $478. I obtained quotes for same size packages off shipping companies for much less though they don’t have the local offices like Fedex & UPS. Though for that money the GF should have it’s own seat on a flight
Keep in mind that the box + foam costs around $200 according to Glowforge. I suppose they could have factored that into the cost of the machine rather than making it part of the shipping cost but it’s probably better marketing to do it the way they did.
~$250 is the cost of the box shipped - no? To be fair, boxes that size are priced at dimensional weight. An empty Glowforge box costs as much to ship as a Glowforge box with a Glowforge in it.
A while back, I calculated the cost of me shipping the Glowforge to Seattle and it was $224.71. Then I calculated just the empty box. It was $224.71.
it’s just my opinion!