It's hard to be a mail forwarder: carders and other troubles

From the outside, it may seem to man that mail forwarding is a very simple business. You receive packages, pack and send. But behind this external simplicity, like behind the tip of the iceberg, are hidden numerous and rather complex processes, and the coordinated work of a fairly large team.

We talk about the difficulties in the work of "Parcels" , which can be divided into several categories.

Safety: carders - no!

Online purchases are made not only by bona fide customers, but also scammers. We call them the collective term carders.

Carders use stolen credit cards or other means of payment obtained illegally, and use them to make purchases in online stores in order to "cash out" stolen funds through a chain of intermediaries.

This is a serious problem for mail forwarders: if a product bought with stolen money arrives at your warehouse and you send it to intruders, then representatives of the law may come and demand clarification. Therefore, if you simply look at the actions of such scammers through the fingers, then the mail forwarder at one fine moment can turn in the eyes of the law from an observer into an accomplice.

The parcel is actively fighting carders and other scammers. The whole security department is involved in this, and to identify Internet fraudsters, we have developed a special service that helps to identify and block carders.

When we find a carder, we close his account permanently, we return the purchases received in his name to the stores, and the money received (if he manages to replenish the balance before we block it) - back to the card with which the payment was received.

Attackers do not like such a policy, because because of this, they lose the money that they just honestly stole. Therefore, the “Banderolkin” site has repeatedly been subjected to serious DDoS attacks. Fortunately, we learned to fight with them, now they do not bother us.

Technical difficulties: DIY

While the mail forwarder is small and processes several dozens, at most hundreds of incoming parcels per day, it can afford to keep records and control orders on the knee. Particularly advanced ones use typical warehouse management solutions. But if you have thousands of packages, such mechanisms, obeying the law of large numbers, begin to fail. Incoming parcels may accidentally end up in someone else's account, operators may simply “forget” about some orders, in some cases the parcel may simply be lost in the bowels of the warehouse.

The parcel has outgrown such a “childhood” period a long time ago, and we quickly realized that in order for the warehouse to work quickly, reliably and without failures, we need an advanced warehouse automation system. We started with “adult” warehouse software, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but after a while we came to the conclusion that it does not provide the efficiency we need, precisely because it was “developed” for managing large quantities of commercial cargo.

Therefore, we have developed our own warehouse management system, which is not so large and universal, but ideally suited precisely for our tasks. A separate team of programmers works every day to improve it. Thanks to her, the warehouse works like a clock, and all processes are automated as much as possible and equipped with accounting and control systems. The influence of the human factor is minimized, and the probability of any error is extremely small.

Not all mail forwarders have chosen this path. Some of our colleagues, even having a rather large stream of orders, continue to process them in semi-manual mode, which, unfortunately, affects the quality and speed of service, and this, in turn, is immediately expressed in public indignation of customers.

Understanding that the development of our own warehouse software is a very complicated and costly business, we decided to help our colleagues and developed a cloud version of our warehouse management system - Qwintry Fulfillment . Thanks to her, any mail forwarder can use our best practices and technologies without any investments. Such decisions make the market better and customers happier!

Difficulty shopping in foreign stores

Despite the fact that buying in American stores in 90% of cases is easy and simple, sometimes customers have difficulties. The causes of difficulties can be different. For example, some stores do not accept payments with foreign bank cards or refuse to send goods to email forwarders. The seller may need to clarify the details of the order, and here the language barrier can become a difficulty.

To solve all such problems, the parcel launched a separate service - Purchase Assistance . It is available from your account on the Parcel website, as well as a convenient extension for Google Chrome. When you use this service, you only need to select a product and send a link to it to the Parcel Service staff who take care of all shopping issues.

Not only difficulties!

Of course, we can cope with all the difficulties, and it is very interesting to look for non-trivial solutions to emerging problems. And such decisions, first of all, concern clients.

Therefore, now we are going to the action "Gadget Parcel" , in the framework of which we have reduced prices for the delivery of devices.

• Deliver a watch, fitness trackers and in-ear headphones costs $ 10
• Delivery of smartphones and large headphones will cost you $ 15
• Tablets and action cameras will come to your home for $ 20

A nice bonus is that you can put a case for them in the package with a smartphone or tablet - the delivery price will not increase.

If you do not live in Russia and do not fall under the action of the action - do not worry! For Belarus and Kazakhstan, the usual delivery of 1 kg of a parcel by our own Qwintry Air service costs only $ 25, so it’s still profitable to buy and deliver equipment with the “Parcel” !