Losing Almost $3,000 to a Human Error

In June 2022, we ordered $3,000 of stock for a client’s Amazon store. The manufacturer was supposed to send this shipment directly to Amazon’s warehouse.

Because of a lack of communication from both sides, ours and the manufacturer’s, the goods were sent to the company’s registered address.

Now the problem is this. For a US company with a Pakistani owner, the usual way is to rent a virtual address for the company. These companies handle small envelopes and such, but this shipment was three big boxes, each one more than 35 pounds. Their policies are different, but usually if nobody contacts them within a few days, boxes like these are thrown away.

If I remember right, I couldn’t sleep for three days until the matter was fully solved. The address company was so kind to us that I still remember that lady with good words.

She accepted our shipping labels, put them on the boxes herself, loaded them into her own car on her way back from work, and dropped them at the UPS office herself, because the UPS truck was not coming for pickup.

This experience saved us more than ten times later

Many times a company was just about to ship to the wrong address and I caught it in time and got it fixed. It still happened sometimes, but we made a policy that every order uses a third-party warehouse address as the shipping address, and this policy also helped us many times.

Mistakes happen, but ignoring them and not making sure they don’t happen again is a bigger mistake, which in business we call a blunder.