UK Carrier botched delivery rankings

A new study by DeliveryApp, a leading same-day delivery tech firm, has uncovered the most common botched delivery complaints about delivery companies on social media across the UK, to see where the problems lie for individual couriers.

Taking a look at the UK’s top six courier companies, including EVRI, DPD, Royal Mail, Yodel, Parcelforce, and Amazon a total of 56,368 botched delivery complaints were made on social media against the service that these couriers provided in 2022. 

With over 11,000 total negative complaint posts from customers claiming that their parcels had been lost, Evri, DPD, and Royal Mail received the most, with Evri alone reaching over 7000. Furthermore, DPD received 20% of complaints about lost parcels, and Amazon got off lightly with 3% of lost parcel complaints.

Turning to searches on Google for the complaints process of the six major delivery couriers in the UK, the total amounts to a staggering 172,260 Google searches a month. To top things off, complaints from Amazon’s customers alone amount to almost 55% of all searches. (Amazon 93,580, Evri 27,670, Royal Mail 24,540, DPD 18,840, Yodel 4,700, Parcelforce 1,930)

However, this data needs to be taken with a wider view than accepting the stats provided in the study as providing a full picture of carrier performance.

On Google searches, for example, Amazon are a retailer, a marketplace and a delivery company so it shouldn’t be surprising that they receive more than their fair search of Google complaint process searches when compared against other carriers.

And again, the study has gathered data on the number of social media botched delivery complaints against carriers without comparing their volumes. Evri may have had the most complaints, but when checking the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index we can see that Evri has around 13% market share whereas DPD are significantly smaller with around 6% market share.

With 30% market share Royal Mail are by far the biggest UK carrier, and Amazon Logistics coming in 2nd place at around 17% market share.

While Evri may have the most complaints on social, and as a proportion of total deliveries is still the highest, DPD isn’t far behind when you consider complaints as a percentage of parcel volume. Indeed it would be somewhat surprising if they didn’t have a relatively high number of issues compared to other much smaller carriers.

Similarly, when considering the volume of Amazon’s Google complaint process searches, not only are Amazon the biggest UK carrier after Royal Mail, but it’s likely many complaints are about product and not delivery.

It’s still interesting to see the data, but it has to be taken in context.