As regular visitors to this website have found, a great many people have been experiencing problems over the years with deliveries (or usually the lack of deliveries) from HDNL, or Yodel as they’re now known. Many visitors to this blog have sworn never to use any companies online who choose to employ Home Delivery Network, with even BBC Watchdog featuring them on their recent series.

Cycle fans will be pleased to know however that a cycle business based in Yorkshire, JE James Cycles, has dropped HDNL after using them for just two months. In that time JE James Cycles reported incidents of bikes being lost for long periods, and even bikes going missing (possibly stolen) while being delivered. JE James Cycles noted that an incredible 77 bikes went missing in a single day because of Home Delivery Network, only to turn up 2 weeks later in the corner of a warehouse.

Naturally this isn’t the sort of customer service that JE James Cycles wants to be associated with, and they have now ditched Home Delivery Network in favour of their original courier, APC Overnight.

Andy Lindsay, from JE James Cycles, commented:

We are a small cycle business based in south Yorkshire, we have just opened up a new warehouse in Rotherham mainly to be used with our mail order side of business.

Due to large increase in internet orders we had a few offers from courier companies, and surprisingly HDNL popped up and the contracts manger/regional sales manager sold this company to us superbly.

Their price was great and they offered us the SMS text messaging service which could boost sales with customers finding deliveries much easier to arrange. We used HDNL for two months and that quickly proved to be two months too long.

We were sending roughly 120 consignments out a day with HDNL and in the very short time we used them we had 3 lost/stolen parcels that we had to claim for and in one day 77 of the 120 were lost for 2 weeks, we were told these got accidentally put in the corner of their sorting depot.

Andy also added that had JE James Cycles been aware of the Watchdog program before it was transmitted they would have liked to have been involved so they could apologise to any of their customers who have been inconvenienced as a result of HDNL.

As an added bonus, Andy also sent us this photo of a Home Delivery Network van reversing into a wall in the icy conditions these last few days. We don’t know who the person’s wall is, or whether there was any damage to the wall, but it’s in Rotherham, near the Wilton Pub.

Is this your wall?

Darren Jamieson

Darren Jamieson, aka MrDaz, is the Technical Director and co-founder of Engage Web and has been working online in a career spanning two decades. His first website was built in 1998 and is still live today.

    

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