[Question] DHL — what am I missing here
Trying to get a straight answer on this: DHL — what am I missing here.
Split one order across two months on purpose to compare summer and winter. Four days apart, same carrier, same route.
Kept a spreadsheet of quoted versus actual across a year. The quote held; the variance was all in the last mile.
Ordered from the warehouse in the UK instead of origin and the whole customs question disappeared. 8 days, door to door.
Would rather be corrected in public than confident in private.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Total transit decomposes into first mile, international leg, clearance and last mile. Only the first two are meaningfully under the shipper’s control and most reported variance sits in the last two.
Total transit decomposes into first mile, international leg, clearance and last mile.
This is why the lane table is organised the way it is. The supplier is not the unit.
Merged into the standing thread for that lane so the reports accumulate in one place.
[deleted]
Was it shipped from a regional warehouse or from origin?
Where did the time actually go — international leg, clearance, or last mile?
Disagree. That is a customs hold, not a carrier delay, and lumping them together makes the lane table wrong.
Posted my first lane report here without the month and got asked for it. Fair, and the table is better for the fussiness.
What lead time were you quoted at checkout?
Why this board reports by lane and not by supplier.
Two members ordering from the same operation, in the same month, can see completely different transit times because they are on different routes with different carriers and different clearance points. Averaging them produces a supplier-level number that predicts nothing for either of them.
A lane — origin, destination, carrier, month — is the smallest thing that behaves consistently enough to be worth measuring. Once a route has a dozen reports behind it the median is genuinely useful, and that is what the tables on the source pages are built from.
Why this board reports by lane and not by supplier.
Agreed — and the decomposition matters. Most people are blaming the international leg for a last-mile problem.
declared value and description are the shipper’s decision, ask what they use
Same lane in a different season for comparison?
Median transit is the useful statistic. The minimum is a story about one shipment and the mean is dragged around by a single hold.
Asked MKM which lines they hold regionally before ordering and got a straight list back. Changed what I ordered and when.
How many shipments does your figure cover?
Careful — the supplier does not control the last mile and most of your variance is in it.
Same lane, four orders, 3 to 21 days, all four within a couple of days of the quote. That consistency is the actual finding.
Push back: comparing a July transit with a February one on the same lane is not a comparison.
Do they publish a reship policy, and did you read it before ordering?
The rigid outer with no rattle in it was the thing that told me most about that supplier, before I had tested anything.
regional stock changes everything about transit
I would not read a single slow shipment as a lane change. Post it and let the median move if it is real.
rigid outer packaging is the cheapest quality signal there is
rigid outer packaging is the cheapest quality signal there is
line_demir is right about regional stock. It changes the shape of the distribution, not just the mean.
rigid outer packaging is the cheapest quality signal there is
Disagreeing with this bit: a single slow shipment does not move a lane, it joins the distribution.
origin, destination, carrier, month — post all four or the report is noise
Clearance took three days and the carrier took nine. I had been blaming the wrong half for two years.
Packaging is assessable on arrival with no equipment: rigid outer, no movement inside, the cold element sized to the transit rather than to the box.
- 1Same lane in a different season for comparison?8 comments in this branch · started by u/emil_agyeman
- 2Total transit decomposes into first mile, international leg, clearance and…6 comments in this branch · started by u/vito_beaulieu