Been down this road before, explained this before – and it's starting to get very old. Very old indeed.
I ordered a single sheet of PVC plastic sheet to use for terrain bases. It was a 1' x 2' 1/8" piece from an Ebay vendor named SB Automation.
Price was very reasonable for a single sheet. Shipping was fast. But when I got the sheet, it was warped/stressed and one edge had an impact damage that cracked the end of the material and bent it up forcibly on the same side. So I got a damaged, bent piece of material.
The sheet had been taped to a single, thin sheet of corrugated cardboard. The whole thing was put inside a manila paper sheet envelope which was useless for protection.
Here are pics. that tell the story by themselves:
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Now, to be fair to SB Automation – they have an overwhelmingly positive feedback score on Ebay of 99.6%, which is nearly perfect. So obviously products are being shipped to a vast, vast majority customers who are happy with the product and how it is processed for them.
What I suspect happened here is that in the grand scheme of a company that probably ships tens of thousands of these sheets a week if not more, my single-sheet order barely registered on their radar in terms of sales. Ok. Whomever packaged the sheet must have decided that a single sheet wasn't worth the company's time to protect properly with any kind of box or actual protection.
How do I know this? Because if you ordered 10, 20 or more sheets, they would HAVE to be boxed because the bundle would be too heavy to hold up just being wrapped in manila paper, they would burst through it. And of course orders of 50 or more sheets would most certainly be boxed simply out of necessity.
If the philosophy of some vendors/companies is that single sheet orders aren't important enough to properly protect in shipment, then I have a suggestion –
DON'T SELL OR OFFER single sheets of anything you produce. Just don't bother. Don't even bother. Have a minimum order of 5 or 10 sheets or whatever.
The fact that my order was insignificant in the grand scheme of things is irrelevant. The fact is I ordered a NEW condition piece of PVC sheeting and paid the NEW price for one. What I got was a damaged, bent, used piece of PVC sheet. I did not receive what I expected I was paying for.
But it gets better. The response I received from SB Automation was even more astonishing. I was told that this was a USPS shipping negligence issue and that I need to take it up with them. "Shipping negligence". Wreckless behavior on USPS's part. Now, let's wrap our heads around that for a moment.
USPS, UPS, DHL, Fed Ex, Amazon and the rest handle and process MILLIONS of packages daily. The schedules for the facility workers and drivers are brutal, the timetables leave no room for delay. Shipping employees/drivers are worked to death for what often amounts to pretty c**p pay overall. Short of deliberate abuse where someone is forcefully throwing a box against a wall or deliberately sabotaging boxes by stomping on them or punching them – all these masses of people can reasonably do is to handle your package quickly and fluidly and move it on the to the next phase, and do it FAST.
How on earth is USPS responsible for a package that has no protection from outside impact forces? The outer edge of a sheet of soft PVC plastic WILL get damaged during the normal handling and processing. My package either struck the interior surface of the truck itself or another package struck the edge of it. Whatever struck it it was most certainly accidental and could not be prevented.
In either case the point of responsibility for that damage has NOTHING, NOTHING to do with USPS. The point of responsibility was 100% with SB Auto. who did not put any kind of impact barrier whatsoever between the product and the outside forces of the world. A sheet of cardboard and manila paper does NOT protect this kind of product from outside forces.
This experience reminded me of Redoubt Enterprises. Great company, great historical minis. But they are notorious for putting big, heavy piles of metal minis. into vinyl shipping bags so that the entire pile of minis. can be battered and bashed from the outside during the entire shipment. You have the pleasure of getting $70.00 USD worth of Civil War soldiers with bayonets and muskets bent or broken off. In metal no less, which is the most difficult to repair in terms of thin bits broken off.
Another example I've experienced are Ebay sellers who use retail boxes as the outside shipping container: i.e. they use Games Workshop retail boxes as the outer shipping box and simply wrap the thing in shipping paper. And then you get the package and its squashed right down to the sprues inside and the seller tells you, "well the mini. sprues made it there undamaged so what's the problem?"
So my question is to all sellers and vendors.
Why do you do this? Why? Is it because "most of the time there's no problem" with minimal shipping? Because it's "ok most of the time"?
If so let me explain yet again what the customer is attempting to do.
When I order a NEW product still in its NEW condition, I expect to receive that product in NEW condition as I saw it described on YOUR website.
"Slightly dinged", "well it got there with mostly no problem", "you can still use it" – that is NOT what I ordered. I didn't f'n order "I can still use it". I didn't order "well it had a little damage but it's mostly new".
If you are a company or an Ebay seller selling anything in a new product state, YOU are the point at which that newness has to be preserved.
If it's a retail box, YOU must put it into another outer box that can actually absorb impact forces during shipment. I repeat for the tenth time now: a hobby retail/display box is NOT, NOT a shipping container.
If it's a piece of bare material like my PVC sheet, YOU must at least put that material completely wrapped in corrugated cardboard OR put it into a box that completely surrounds the material. A piece of cardboard backing is NOT protection for a new material like what I ordered.
I'm upset, yeah.
begins to think about terrain for Team Yankee.
