Dear wonderful donors,
A number of you have contributed to Ukraine Aid Ops through our Amazon wishlists, in the US and on Amazon Germany. Recently, we have been notified by a few of you that some of your Amazon US purchases on our behalf may have been marked as “running late” or even “lost”, in their order status.
If this has happened to you: We believe that this is in fact not correct, and the orders are highly likely to have reached our warehouse in Florida. We have manually verified with several of them which were marked as late or lost, by getting the actual USPS tracking numbers, seeing that they were in fact marked delivered by the USPS, and then verifying with our forwarding service that a package matching that number was received at the warehouse.
Apparently, this is actually common with large forwarding warehouses. What happens is the packages come in on pallets and giant bags from Amazon, and the delivery people are moving so quickly that they sometimes miss scanning a pallet or bag so there isn’t a final “Delivered” update on the package’s tracking history. And that’s what Amazon picks up for their order status. USPS can later go back and say “wait, wasn’t that delivered today?” and change the status of the shipment, but there is still no scan of it being actually delivered, and that creates a disconnect between Amazon and USPS. Most of the customers of forwarding services like this are also the people shipping the items, so they can confirm it for themselves by looking at their account. But we are different, as we are not the ones ordering.
Now, this is Amazon’s fault (sort of), but as a result, after a few weeks they will mark the package as lost, and offer you, the buyer, a refund. This might seem like a tempting way to get a free donation on Jeff Bezos’s dime. However, it actually ends up hurting our suppliers instead, because they end up having the refund processed out of their Amazon payouts – even though we did, in fact, receive the goods! So if your package gets marked “Running late” or “Lost”, please rest assured that it probably did make it to us. You can even verify that yourself, by getting the USPS tracking number associated with the Amazon shipment, and looking it up on USPS.com. And if you want to be extra sure, you can feel free to email us at info@ukraineaidops.org (or drop us a DM on Twitter) with your tracking number, and we’ll be happy to confirm it with our forwarding service so you can rest easy.
Thanks again for your generous donations, and Slava Ukraini!
– Alan
US Logistics Team
Ukraine Aid Ops
