Cable
Omono
I have had good luck with USPS when I use their boxes with the fixed-rate shipping. However this is only good for seedlings or small trees. Anything larger... and I refuse to ship with them.
Just recently, while I still lived in California, I had placed an order for a few bonsai pots that were being shipping via USPS. The day they were to be delivered, I made sure I stayed home the entire day because I wanted to make sure I received the pots. When sitting in my office, I look out at the street in front of the house, and can see any truck that pulls up, or any delivery person who walks up to our door.
Imagine my surprise when I get a "package delivered" notification, despite no one approaching my house. I immediately called the local office, and they said, in not so many words, that it isn't unusual for the delivery people to "batch process" the delivery notifications while they start their routes, and then deliver the packages later. Wait, they said, and the box will show up. Well it didn't show up... that day or the next. Finally, after I physically went down to the post office to talk to a manager, they pulled up the GPS info for the delivery truck, and realized they had, in fact, delivered my box to the wrong address. My pots had gone to a neighbor... but they refused to tell me which neighbor it was because they didn't want to cause friction. Instead they sent a different delivery person out to talk to the household where they delivered my box... and those people denied having received anything.So there ya go. And even AFTER all of this, the pots were insured, and trying to get the insurance payment from USPS was a trial - despite their admission that they had caused the problem.
Never again... If you can't ship via UPS or FedEx I won't order anything expensive from you. I can't control which carrier Amazon uses... but Amazon has such a bullet-proof delivery guarantee that I don't sweat it if they ship USPS and my package is lost en-route. It's on them because they decided to use a less reputable carrier.
I had an order I had drop shipped USPS go sideways a couple of months ago. It ended up in the wrong city in Michigan. It got marked in their system as "returned" but neither the customer nor the shipper ever got it. I called the wrong Post Office (which was more difficult than I was expecting) and got ahold of someone who remembered the package and said they had forwarded it to the correct address. It finally got there after like two weeks. Thankfully, it was only wire!
I'm keeping my ban on shipping trees until temps in most of the US are at least above freezing during the day. I often have deliveries that arrive in the morning and have to sit for hours and hours until the person gets home from work. I also ordered some seedlings earlier this winter and I missed the delivery notification so they sat in the mailbox all night. Fortunately when I realized they had been delivered and unboxed they weren't frozen.
