How did my Amazon package end up in Texas?

October 3, 2020 6:21 PM

Amazon says that I'll get a refund, but I'm curious about how this happened. I ordered an item from Amazon and according to the tracking information, it was shipped by FedEx and was delivered today... to New Braunfels, Texas. I don't live in Texas and never have. The shipping information on the Amazon order was correct. So what is likely to have happened?

The seller is one of those that is invisible until you actually order the item and it tells you who it's fulfilled by. Looking at their seller page, there are several recent reviews mentioning the same problem. Is this seller running a scam? Are they just extremely careless with shipping labels?

posted by Kutsuwamushi to Shopping (11 answers total)

I had a package like this and I'm convinced they just gave me the wrong tracking number. The package itself came the next day.
posted by aetg at 6:51 PM on October 3, 2020

This happened to me on Etsy, and I believe it was a scam in my case. YMMV. Placed the order, which got delayed multiple times. The seller, in India, asked me to be patient due to pandemic. I was patient but decided after six weeks to cancel the order. Seller then messaged it was en route and later produced DHL shipping information to an address in my state, which wasn't mine. Etsy kept showing the item was delivered and closed the complaint I'd opened. I got nowhere with Etsy or the seller about the mis-delivered item. I finally had to escalate to Paypal, which finally got me a refund. Etsy now seems to have removed the seller from their site. I should've gone deeper into the reviews when I made the purchase because this same thing happened to several other buyers with that seller--delayed shipment, shipping information to wrong address, Etsy closing out complaint because shipping indicated delivery, then having to get Paypal to resolve. Your situation may be similar, though it sounds as if Amazon resolved it, unlike Etsy in my case.
posted by Elsie at 4:09 AM on October 4, 2020

The same thing happened to me, and it was almost certainly a scam (though I don't understand how it was supposed to work). I ordered a pair of running shoes from Amazon. They were being sold by a third-party vendor and were suspiciously cheap (this should have clued me in). The tracking number showed the package as having been sent somewhere else, a thousand miles away from me. I checked the reviews for the seller, and there were dozens of posts complaining about the same thing. Amazon gave me a refund, but I had a lot of trouble getting them to remove the seller from their platform. I had several on-line chats with Amazon's customer service, but the reps didn't seem to grasp what I was telling them, and the shoes remained visible for at least a couple of weeks afterward (eventually, I stopped checking, so I don't know how long it actually took to remove them).
posted by alex1965 at 5:43 AM on October 4, 2020

Yeah, I had this, I'm in the UK and my package (from China) was delivered to an address in Orange County in California. Then COVID hit and the seller couldn't re-ship so I got a refund.
posted by essexjan at 5:58 AM on October 4, 2020

At my work, we received a 16 lb shot ball. We are in St. Louis, MO. It was addressed to Levar Burton, in Texas. So you could say I had one of Geordi's balls in my hands.

Point being, sometimes shit goes where you don't expect.
posted by notsnot at 7:47 AM on October 4, 2020 [6 favorites]

Putting aside any questions of scams, that I'm not qualified to answer, there's a couple of potential shipping things that could have gone wrong. It's possible that some kind of computer thingamajig got crossed, unlikely, but possibly.

Facilities that Amazon and Fedex use contain a lot of machinery, conveyor belts and automated sorters and the like. It's not inconceivable that a machine dropped it into the wrong sorting slot, or even stole a label from another package.

And of course the more human interaction there is, the more chances of a slip up. There's a lot of potential errors in loading trucks and such. A lot of the interactions are computerized, so someone might not even really read the label
posted by Jacen at 9:27 AM on October 4, 2020

It could be some kind of scam, or it could just be a weird mis-sort. I worked for UPS in one of the sorting facilities packing trucks for a while, and I can tell you that each hop has a lot of manual intervention. There was a primary sort where they humans would be looking at the zip codes and sending them to different secondary pickoff conveyor positions, where someone looks at the zip code and pushes each package down a chute to a truck, and it's in the truck where the people packing things check the zip and scan the barcode. (That's how you get the tracking history). The people in the pick positions had to memorize the lists of zip codes and where they go. (You actually got a whole one dollar/hour raise if you took the zip code memorization test)

That was a fairly small facility, the long distance ones with trains and such are much more complicated.

They aimed for a limit of 1/4000 packages getting loaded on the wrong truck. They even gave you a T-shirt for hitting that goal. Occasionally, someone got the shirt, but overall, most people didn't really care. It's actually kind of amazing how much gets where it's supposed to go, and gets there undamaged.
posted by mrgoat at 11:39 AM on October 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

Can you tell how big of an operation the seller is running? A friend who sometimes sells stuff online just accidentally shipped a package to Texas (really!) just because they were sending out two items at once and put the wrong shipping label on the wrong package. If it's just one person, the possibility of human error is high and non-mysterious.
posted by babelfish at 10:15 PM on October 4, 2020

I had a cookbook from Amazon go, instead of Seattle, to Guam, where it showed as "delivered". Amazon sent me a new one, and a month later the original package turned up, having taken a leisurely trip through Honolulu. When it arrived, the box had two USPS labels on it - one for me, and one for someone in Guam with a totally different name. I don't know if they reused a box, or accidentally slapped two labels on it, or what, but it wasn't a scam, just an error somewhere in the shipping process.
posted by skycrashesdown at 10:17 PM on October 4, 2020

I had a computer delivered to an address in Florida. I live in Texas. The woman on the phone when I called to complain didn't seem to think anything was wrong when I explained that. After a lot of emails, phone calls, and threatening to reverse the charges on my credit card, I finally received a computer, but no apology and no explanation.

In this case, my suspicion is that somebody in the packing and shipping process decided to give themselves or a friend a computer. (A Wacom tablet computer, to be precise. Wacom has terrible customer service, do not recommend, but they're also the leading company in this and other specialized hardware, alas.)
posted by telophase at 8:08 AM on October 5, 2020

I got a package with my label but someone else's contents. Amazon had no reasonable way for me to return the items, even through I the actual sender's address/order (receipt inside the box). They just told be to keep the items (just some random iphone case and screen protector, among other things). I'm sure someone else somewhere got the contents of my order (similarly trivial items). Amazon canceled my order.

I suspect your seller was just being careless. But if you're curious, search for your street address in that area. Could be the zip code was entered wrong and routing went haywire based off that error.

Package logistics must be quite the adventure sometimes.
posted by wkearney99 at 4:05 PM on October 6, 2020