Sean's blog

Pos Malaysia Parcel Tracking and Online feedback both broken

A couple of customers of Lolyco.com have been asking this weekend when their orders will be delivered to Australia. When an order is shipped from Lolyco.com, an email is sent to the customer with a link to Pos Malaysia’s Parcel Tracking System and the Parcel Tracking Reference. First things first, Pos Malaysia have been 100% reliable for deliveries from Lolyco.com – we have no complaints there at all.

POS Malaysia - Reference Number does not exist

The customers who have contacted us recently have used the link to Pos Malaysia’s Tracking System, entered their Tracking Reference and got a message that says:

Your Reference Number does not exist!.

At which point, a customer might naturally conclude that we haven’t really posted their parcel. One of these orders was placed 10 days ago (6 working days + 1 public holiday). Time enough, one would imagine, to record a tracking reference.

We’re caught between a rock and a hard place with Pos Malaysia. Their nearest competitors charge around 5 times what Pos Malaysia charges for its cheapest delivery service. At one time we offered this competing service as a shipping option on the basis that it gave good quality tracking information. Not one single customer chose it.

We’re left with the final ironic option of telephoning Pos Malaysia to make an enquiry about their online parcel tracking system. We did try to use their feedback option, offered on the page that tells our customers that their tracking reference doesn’t exist, and got this reply by email:

Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

From: postmaster@pos.com.my

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

       corpcomm@pos.com.my

So now you know. If the tracking system isn’t working, you can try the customer feedback system. That also doesn’t work!

Lolyco.com also maintains a couple of osCommerce shipping modules for integrating e-Commerce businesses with Pos Malaysia’s website. Pos Malaysia occasionally does something unnecessary and incompetent that breaks those too.

I went through a phase, a year or two ago, of emailing Pos Malaysia every few weeks offering to come to their office and fix their tracking system for free. I got no reply. I guess the upshot of this issue is this:

1. The tracking system is broken.
2. You can’t report that it’s broken because the reporting system is broken too.
3. They have no ability / desire to fix it.

I haven’t got anything more to say right now, unless someone knows how to spell the noise I would make if I went into the kitchen and boiled my head in a big pot.