Furious shoppers are boycotting stores that use Evri to deliver parcels

Angry shoppers are turning their backs on major retailers that use parcel company Evri to deliver their online orders, Money Mail can reveal.

Popular British brands — including Marks & Spencer, Next and John Lewis — have been criticised for using the firm, voted the UK’s worst delivery company.

Money Mail receives an endless stream of complaints about the poor service customers have experienced with Evri, with many parcels arriving months late or lost entirely.

Evri is the UK’s largest parcel carrier, delivering more than 2.5 million a day from 80 per cent of the UK’s biggest retailers.

Evri’s services will soon be offered over the counter at Post Office branches. Evri says it delivers 730 million parcels a year, of which 99.5 per cent are dispatched successfully.

Complaints: Evri is the UK’s largest parcel carrier, delivering more than 2.5 million packages a day from 80% of the UK’s biggest retailers

Our calculations show the company is failing to distribute 3.7 million parcels annually and more than 5.8 million ‘next day’ parcels do not arrive on time each year.

Formerly known as Hermes, it rebranded last year, promising top-notch service. But Money Mail’s postbag is full of horror stories that suggest the name change has only served to paper over the cracks.

Now, readers are telling us they’ve had enough. A growing number are so fed up they are deliberately avoiding shopping online with retailers using Evri.

One, Lee Newsome, was left enraged after the firm lost his £5,000 replica Elvis Presley gold and white jumpsuit in February. 

The 51-year-old, from Oldham, has been impersonating the King of Rock ‘n ‘ Roll for years and had ordered the custom-made stage costume from B&K Enterprises, a U.S.-based company with links to Elvis.

When it arrived, however, Lee realised it was too small and didn’t think twice about sending it back for alterations. Lee chose shipping company Ship2World, which said it could deliver the package to America within 48 hours.

However, he did not know Ship2World would give his parcel to courier Evri to handle the logistics. It was six months before he would see his costume again.

‘It was a nightmare from start to finish,’ says Lee, who also runs Elvis-themed fish and chip van, Cod in a Trap.

‘When I found out my parcel was given to Evri my heart sank. I’d heard of its reputation for poor service. Two weeks after it was sent, I was told the parcel had gone missing in the warehouse.’

Lee spent hours trying to track it down. He sent seven emails to Evri chief executive, Martijn de Lange, before receiving an update.

‘All of a sudden, I got an email from his office saying my parcel was found and I could pick it up from a Middlesex office,’ Lee says.

Evri offered him just £25 in compensation.

‘I will never buy from a retailer that uses Evri again and wouldn’t send another parcel with Evri if it was the last courier in the world,’ Lee says. ‘Once your parcel is in its system, you are left wondering if it will make it to its destination.’

‘£150 trainers lost in transit’

Colin Harrison, 56, an IT worker, was dismayed after the box that should have contained his son Murphy’s Nike Air max 95 trainers arrived at their home in Reading, Berkshire, empty.

‘I’m upset because when I bought the trainers from the Foot Asylum website it gave me options for couriers. I could have opted for DPD but it was more expensive.

‘I was in a rush to get the trainers, so chose Evri’s next-day delivery. I ordered them for my son to wear on his 14th birthday.

‘He was going to Spain on a school trip and asked me to order them,’ the father of five says.

‘Ordinarily, I would never pay £150 for a pair of trainers, but he’s been saving up for them and paid with his own money.’

Lost: Our calculations show Evri is failing to distribute 3.7 million parcels annually and more than 5.8 million ‘next day’ parcels do not arrive on time each year

When Colin contacted Evri about the mistake, it blamed retailer, Foot Asylum. Foot Asylum told Colin it has CCTV evidence the parcel left the warehouse intact.

The firm has now refunded £150 for the loss but could not be reached for comment. However, Colin believes that he has been treated like a criminal. ‘It is disgraceful that Foot Asylum is implying that I’ve opened the bag and taken the trainers,’ he says.

‘customer order disappeared’

Melanie Parkin, from Derbyshire, is determined never to use Evri again to post items she has sold online.

In August, the 59-year-old retired nurse sold a pair of football shorts for £10 on eBay. The online marketplace offers several delivery options for sellers to use. 

Melanie chose Evri as it was the cheapest.A week after dropping off the parcel at her local Evri drop-off point, the buyer emailed to say the shorts had not yet arrived.

When Melanie chased Evri, she was told that as she had chosen delivery through the letterbox rather than to a collection point, she was not able to claim compensation for the loss.

‘It’s not a lot of money but it’s the principle. It’s appalling how I’ve been treated. If it loses something, Evri should replace it.’

When Money Mail contacted Evri on Melanie’s behalf, it offered her £20 as a gesture of goodwill.

‘I got a dress instead of keys’

After 53-year-old customer services manager at East Midlands Railway, Mark Cobain spent the night in a Bristol hotel, where he was visiting for a gig, he left his car keys in the bedside drawer. 

Once back home in Mickleover, Derbyshire, he contacted the hotel and arranged for an Evri courier to pick the keys up from the hotel and deliver them to him.

Three days later, he received an Evri package but inside he found — not keys — but a little black dress.

‘I had to explain to my wife why I was getting a dress in the post,’ he says.

‘I have no idea how but my delivery label appeared to have accidentally become affixed to someone else’s parcel — underneath my label was another label.

Mark had paid insurance to Evri, but was told that he would need to complete a claims form and wait 28 days before he could receive a refund.

‘There is no transparency, you pay for a service but it seems like luck if your parcel appears. I wish I’d got the next train to Bristol and collected the keys myself.

‘This is the first time I’ve ever used Evri. Would I use Evri again? Probably not.’

Evri has since contacted Mark to offer him £302 in compensation. Mark never received his car keys.

‘Evri lost birthday gifts for my daughter’

Rhiane Matthews, 45, was annoyed when the parcel that should have contained £178.20 worth of clothes for her daughter Demi’s 21st birthday turned up empty.

The mother of five from Swansea had ordered several items from fashion retailer Pretty Little Thing as gifts, including a coat costing £125 and a £21 scarf.

Name change: Evri was formerly known as Hermes but rebranded last year, promising top-notch service after a flood of complaints

She selected next-day delivery at the online checkout when placing her order. But when the parcel of gifts arrived at her home, only the scarf was inside the Evri package.

‘I wanted to make Demi’s birthday extra special this year because we had to cancel everything for her 18th birthday owing to the Covid lockdown,’ says Rhiane, who works in healthcare.

‘I pay £9.99 a year to Pretty Little Thing for next-day delivery so I expected my order to arrive quickly.

‘The parcel arrived on time, but was missing items so I told the courier that I would not accept it.’

The courier returned Rhiane’s order to the depot and she is now waiting for a refund from Pretty Little Thing for the undelivered items.

Now Rhiane says she is unwilling to shop online again.

‘It’s very frustrating. I don’t want to order online any more, as I just don’t want Evri to deliver my parcels,’ she says.

‘I would much rather take the time to go to the shop and pick up items myself.’

Evri says it has recruited 273 customer service advisers ahead of the festive period and has invested £10 million in its customer-service operations.

An Evri spokesman says: ‘Our ambition is that every customer’s experience with Evri is a positive one — every parcel matters and we have invested more than £46 million in preparation for our busiest time of year, taking on an extra 6,500 people and have almost doubled our 650 UK-based customer service advisers.

‘We have recently launched an automated phone line alongside significant improvements to our online chat response service, as we aim to provide an answer for everyone within 24 hours.’

a.cooke@dailymail.co.uk

Am I talking to a chatbot, I asked. Then my troubles with Evri really began…  

By SUE REID  

Hot nights under a duvet were wrecking my sleep this summer, so I ordered a voluminous white cotton sheet to throw over my bed instead.

The promise of quick delivery from the normally reliable John Lewis made me think my insomnia troubles were over. Then I waited.

I holidayed in Spain, went to South Africa on a work assignment and visited friends in the Cotswolds for a long weekend. Six weeks later, the parcel I ordered on the internet in early August still hadn’t turned up at home.

The first time I found a moment to chase up my missing king size sheet was mid-September. I looked up the parcel reference and sent a message to the delivery company.

Their name — Evri — should have sounded the alarm. I know now that this snappy title is the new branding of German delivery giant Hermes, which had been accused — in media reports it strongly refutes — of carelessly throwing parcels around holding depots and over customers’ garden fences.

When I emailed Evri, I got a quick reply from someone called Sophie at customer services saying she would look into my missing sheet. I thought the message sounded a bit robotic, I could have been wrong. So I asked, rather cheekily, at the end of my next message: ‘Am I talking to a chatbot?’

From then on, all my messages from Evri as the parcel search went on were entitled: ‘Chatbot Inquiry’. But, during our correspondence, they never answered my question about whether I was dealing with a machine.

When I did some research, I found that my suspicion was not completely off the wall.

All sorts of businesses have been steadily adopting chatbots to answer customer questions. No wonder, installing chatbot software can save up to 30 pc in costs.

But as one article on the rising popularity of these digital devices, which mimic human conversation or messages, says: ‘They can never really offer a genuine “I’m sorry” the way a human can.’

That’s certainly the truth. I bristled at Sophie in a series of emails and the missing sheet remained … missing. I was told to check if another household member or a neighbour had picked up the parcel. Infuriatingly, I was asked if the sheet had been located since my original inquiry.

Finally (again referencing their reply as Chatbot Inquiry), another email came in from Evri customer services. This said an investigation had shown the parcel had been left in an ‘unsafe place’ by the garden gate on September 29 — a date that was wildly out as the original delivery date was August 10.

More bizarrely, Evri suggested I should ‘resolve’ my complaint by contacting ‘Sports Direct’. Whoops! I simply emailed back: ‘It was John Lewis.’ There has been silence ever since.

I finally got my sheet delivered when I called John Lewis. A nice human looked up my order number and arranged for another delivery company to send a substitute.

So what happened to the original parcel? No one will ever know precisely. And I believe, if the truth be told, that Evri is in the dark, too.