How not to lose a parcel: educational program on tracking services

 

Even with current currency fluctuations, overseas online shopping is often profitable and continues to be popular. Although complaints about long delivery times and errors by postal services are also not uncommon. To sleep peacefully and be sure that your package is not lost, you should use various tracking services.

 

If you think that you are not always lucky with parcels, we can convince you otherwise. Our editorial team has plenty of bad luck in its arsenal of stories. Parcels “disappeared into thin air” on the way from China and the USA, traveled from Germany to Thailand due to an error by postal services, arrived damaged… Therefore, it’s probably not worth talking about the usefulness of tracking numbers. This is at least some kind of guarantee that your purchase will not disappear without a trace. In addition,tracking is often in itself a guarantee of a refund. For example, the popular iHerb does not guarantee a refund for a purchase if the package is lost. Although we were lucky – after a long correspondence with the administration, the mission turned out to be feasible. Which, however, did not cancel the disappointment that it was not possible to get the right product.

 

When purchasing from large online trading platforms like eBay or AliExpress, you should always pay attention to whether the postal service chosen by the seller supports package tracking. When choosing a product, you need to carefully read the description: if it contains the words “track number”, the seller sends the parcels with a track; if not, there will most likely not be a tracking number. In any case, you can ask to send your purchase to another postal service, which will assign a tracking number. But it usually costs more, so it’s worth discussing all the points before you place an order. Perhaps the cost will increase so exorbitantly that the meaning of the purchase will disappear completely.

 

Find out the tracking number of your parcel is very easy. After you have paid for the purchase and the seller has sent it, the number should appear in your profile on the website in the purchases section (in fact, opposite the specific purchase). Please note that you can only track your parcel using a track number, which consists of an alphanumeric combination consisting of four letters and nine numbers (for example, FT123456789CN). No order numbers, reserve numbers or parcel serial numbers on eBay are suitable for tracking. The track number becomes active 3-5 days after sending.

 

 

In general, there are two types of track numbers: internal, which are issued to record the fact of departure and are not tracked after the parcel leaves the country of departure, and international – a single parcel number along the entire route from the sender to the recipient. Therefore, if you have any doubts, you should check with the seller exactly what tracking number he gave you.

 

The tracking number in the shopping list is usually clickable and leads to the website of a specific postal service, for example, USPS or ChinaPost. But alas, on them you can usually find out information about the parcel only until it has left the sending country.

 

For example, from mid-October 2015, the USPS service stopped tracking the movement of even registered international mail throughout the country, except for those sent by EMS courier delivery. Tracking feature is disabled for countries selectively. Alas, Ukraine was included in the “black list”. Therefore, if you need tracking, you will have to pay extra. You can then track your purchase on the USPS website page by entering the identification number in the “What’s your label (or receipt) number?” field. and clicking “Find”.

 

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Popular mail services

www.dhl.com.ua

www.ups.com

www.emsukraine.com.ua

www.fedex.com/ua/

www.ups.com

http://services.ukrposhta.ua/bardcodesingle – tracking of Ukrposhta shipments

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Tracking sites: deception and reality

 

After sending a parcel, you can track its movement on many specialized websites. However, we should not forget that a new type of fraud has already appeared here.

 

 

So, quite popular stories were something like this: the buyer receives from the seller the tracking number of the parcel and a link to a certain website to track this parcel. This situation, for example, is quite common for AliExpress and almost all sellers do exactly this. But the difficulty was that the provided track number was tracked only on the site specified by the seller and categorically did not want to be tracked on other sites. In this case, there is a high probability that you are dealing with a fake site. You can check it on resources that scan sites for security, for example, Scamadviser (www.scamadviser.com).

 

There are quite a few regular tracker sites that can track the movement of a parcel. The most popular of them:

 

1. “Where is the Parcel” is a service linked to a huge number of postal services around the world, including even the exotic post offices of India or Malaysia. After registering on the service, you can store the track numbers of expected parcels in your account and receive notifications about changes in the status of the parcel by email.

 

 

2. 17track.net is an English-language analogue of the previous service. One of its advantages is the choice of destination country. Having selected the one you need, you can go directly to the tracking service of your local postal service.

 

 

3. Boxoh.com – information on this site is updated very quickly, almost simultaneously with the sites of official postal services. In addition, you can track the movement of the parcel on a map (some only in the States, others around the world).

 

 

4. Track-ChinaPost.com is a service that combines parcel tracking from all services that cooperate with China Post. It will be convenient for regulars of AliExpress and buyers of Chinese goods from eBay in the first place.

 

 

Tracking apps

 

1. AfterShip Package Tracker is a simple application for Android smartphones that collects information about shipments in the databases of more than 200 carriers. It is minimalistic, does not have any special settings, but also does not place ads, even in the free version.

 

 

2. Package Buddy is a tracker with a little more settings, where you can select or define a delivery service, add tracking of multiple packages with notifications about status changes, etc. Some options are available only to Pro users – for example, synchronizing the application with all your Android devices, or redirecting emails with the current status to your email.

 

 

3. TrackChecker Mobile is a Russian-language application in its third, improved version. The range of settings here is quite wide: the status is checked both automatically and manually, there is a widget for the desktop, support for notifications, marking the duration of the parcel journey, entering information using a barcode scanner and much more.

 

 

Deciphering the tracking number

 

Most international tracking numbers look something like this: АА123456789AA – 13 characters, the first two and last two of which are Latin letters, and the rest are numbers. The first letter is responsible for the type of shipment, according to international standards:

 

E – express delivery (EMS), expedited delivery, which costs more than usual;

L is a regular letter that cannot be tracked;

V – letter that was insured;

C — parcel weighing from 2 kg;

R – letter or parcel weighing up to 2 kg.

 

The last two letters of the tracking indicate the sending country. The recipient’s country is not indicated in the track number. The sending country is marked with a special code that corresponds to a special ISO standard. For example, CN is the code for China, SG for Singapore, HK for Hong Kong, GB for Great Britain, CA for Canada, DE for Germany, FR for France, IT for Italy, US for the USA, JP for Japan, etc.

 

It is worth noting that some international courier services may use a completely different type of code. This primarily applies to DHL, Fedex, etc. Their codes can only consist of a set of numbers, and their number can be different.