Losing Almost $3,000 to a Human Error
In June 2022, we ordered stock worth $3,000 for a client’s Amazon store. The shipment was supposed to be sent by the manufacturer directly to an Amazon warehouse.
Due to a lack of communication — equally from our side and the manufacturer’s — the items were shipped to the company’s registered address instead.
Here’s why that’s a problem. The usual practice for a US company owned by a Pakistani founder is to rent a virtual address. Those services can handle small envelopes and the like, but this shipment was three large boxes, each over 35 pounds. Virtual address companies have varying policies, but they generally discard boxes like that after a few days if no one gets in touch.
If I remember correctly, I couldn’t sleep for three days until the matter was properly resolved. The address company accommodated us so graciously that I still think of the person fondly.
She accepted our shipping labels, put them on the boxes, loaded them into her own car on her way home from work, and delivered them to the UPS office herself — because the UPS truck wouldn’t come for pickup.
That experience has saved us more than ten times since. On several occasions a company was about to ship to the wrong address and I caught it in time. Things still went wrong occasionally, but we made a policy of always listing a third-party warehouse as the shipping address on every order — and that policy has rescued us on multiple occasions too.
Mistakes happen. But ignoring those mistakes and not making sure they never happen again is a bigger mistake — the kind we call a BLUNDER in business.