Delayed deliveries, lost parcels, and indifferent customer support? Meest-express is for you. Updated 05.01.23

I never thought I'd have to write a post like this, but I wanted to warn you about the problems you may run into when using Meest-express.

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I'll start with an introduction in the form of a quote from the well-known movie *Interstate 60*, which perfectly sums up the work of Meest's postal service, and especially its customer support.


So, sometime in the first half of November, I ordered various items from AliExpress. Since direct delivery to Kharkiv was proving difficult, I had them sent to an address in Lviv.
You might think, what could possibly go wrong? The post delivers the parcels, someone gathers them together, then sends the whole batch on to Kharkiv. But Meest Express managed to prove that even this can be messed up.

Actually, to make things easier, I arranged to have them redirected as soon as they entered Ukraine and cleared customs. First, my daughter redirected them to her address in Kharkiv, then arranged another redirect with courier delivery to our address, also in Kharkiv.

There were two parcels, and their tracking histories were almost identical, with only a minimal difference: one entered the country on December 2, the other on December 3.


There really was nothing unusual about this operation, especially since, as I understand it, all the redirects were made while the parcels were still at the warehouse in Lviv.

For convenience, I’ll show the sequence of events and conversations on a calendar.
December 2–3: the parcels entered the country and cleared customs successfully.
December 4: delivery address changed to Kharkiv
December 8: delivery address changed to ours, also in Kharkiv, and courier delivery arranged.


December 14: I called Meest Express support with the obvious question: where exactly are my parcels? They replied, “Sorry, there’s a delay with the redirect. You’ll most likely get them in five days.” Since it was Wednesday, they said that probably meant Monday.
I thought, maybe something really had gone wrong with the redirect.


You might ask why I called at all, and why specifically on December 14.

On December 10, a courier delivered a parcel to me, but it contained only one of the two items in that order. At first I thought it was a mistake, so I wrote to the seller. He replied that he had split the parcel in two and gave me a second tracking number.
But today I checked the tracking information for the parcel I’d received again, and was surprised to see that three parcels had arrived at customs on December 2–3, while I’d received only one. And if you compare the screenshots, it’s clear that all three parcels went through the same steps at the same time. The only difference is that the first was already in Kharkiv on December 7, redirected to my address on December 8, and delivered on December 10, while the others were still stuck even on December 8.

I also asked about the other two while I was at it, because on December 13 I received two parcels from the Nkon store that had been sent at the very end of November.
But I wasn’t calling about the parcels I’d received; those were fine. I was calling about a third parcel that had been mistakenly sent to our address, which we handed back to the courier. To be clear, that was the store’s mistake, and the parcel went on to its intended recipient.
Since I was calling about that, I also asked about the redirected parcels.


Like any reasonable person, I waited until Monday. But since the parcel statuses hadn’t changed, I decided to call customer support again that evening. When I asked, “Where are my parcels?” I got the same answer: they were still at the warehouse in Lviv, a request had been submitted, and I’d be getting them very, very soon. No need to worry.


I called on Tuesday and Wednesday, but kept hearing exactly the same thing: “We’ll speed up the dispatch of your parcels, don’t worry.” When I asked for a somewhat more specific date, they just said, “We’ll speed it up.” In other words, customer support couldn’t tell me anything concrete, and dodged my specific questions.

Customer support advised me to contact the claims and service quality department, so on December 21 I filed claims for both parcels, including the tracking numbers and the details of my complaint.
How naive I was! The website said requests were processed in 30 minutes, but customer support later told me that processing takes 10 (ten) business days—that is, two calendar weeks!


I called every day throughout the week. They told me about dispatch delays, power outages, delivery by riding turtles, and how parcels were being routed to Kharkiv through Lviv, which had increased the workload. (I wonder which city they used to route them through with Meest Express?)
But the guy I spoke to on Friday was the most surprising. He told me the parcels were already in transit. I replied that if that was true, why couldn’t I see it in their tracking system? And then came the spectacular answer:
“We’re under constant DoS attacks, so tracking updates are delayed.” Right, other parcels show up on their website, but only my two are being DoSed....

When I asked him for the time of the last scan (every parcel movement is accompanied by a scan of its number, which is entered into the database, usually with the current time attached), he said the time wasn’t displayed on his end.

But that wasn’t all. He also told me that because of the holidays (December 25), they wouldn’t be working on Monday. Okay, I asked, so you’ll be working on Saturday? He said yes.
The result:
1. They didn’t work on Saturday; they worked on Monday.
2. Nobody gives a damn about the site.
2. As you can imagine, my parcels hadn't actually gone anywhere, which means customer support had blatantly lied to me.

A week went by like this.


Yesterday I called again and heard exactly the same answers.
Actually, no—in this call, customer support was even more brazen. On my first call, the woman simply wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise during her monologue, then eventually just hung up on me. I'm a simple man, so I called again and got through to another operator. She was a bit more polite, but in the end said there was nothing she could do to help me and hung up too.
By the way, since when can an operator just hang up whenever they feel like it?

The first woman (if I'm remembering correctly) said the truck to Kharkiv was being loaded gradually, and once it was loaded, it would set off and deliver my parcels. But excuse me, does your truck only run once a month? Seriously? Doesn't it run at least once a week, on Tuesdays?

The second woman, who also ended up hanging up on me, told me that apparently I'm not listed as an alternate recipient!


So I've been calling them for almost two weeks, and now I'm told that, yes, the forwarding request is there, but the recipient hasn't been changed and my name isn't on it.
But excuse me, then what is this?


Today is December 28. The shipment status is still stuck on December 8, the delivery address change is still pending, and customer support keeps giving me the same lines. Honestly, an automated phone system is far more informative.
At least they gave me an email address where I can submit a claim for compensation. Now I'm wondering how long they take to review those. A month? Two?

When I ask how long forwarding takes, they tell me 2–3 days. As you can imagine, it's been a lot longer than that.
When I asked how long parcel delivery within Ukraine takes, they also said that under their service standards it should take no more than 10 business days. As of December 28, it's clearly been longer than that—even if you count December 8 as day one, rather than December 3, when the parcels cleared customs and arrived at the Meest Express warehouse.



Then today I got a notification on another number—the one my other parcels are being sent to as well. In short: we can't do our jobs for shit, so we're washing our hands of our delivery deadlines. Go look for your parcels wherever you like.
There's just one catch: that's not how it works. Every postal operator has not only rights but also obligations it has to fulfill. And the deadlines are often set with plenty of leeway. If the operator can't even meet those deadlines—as in my case—then there's clearly a serious problem.


As for my parcels, the items in them are directly related to making the current power supply problems easier to deal with. I don't just need them here and now—I needed them a month ago. What's more, I can't reorder them at the same prices, and some of the items are difficult to order at all.
The uncertainty is also really getting to me. If the parcels were stolen, I need to order replacements, and I've already lost time—not to mention having to find the money somewhere. If they weren't stolen, why aren't they being delivered? I don't really believe the story that they're “sitting in the warehouse and will be delivered any moment now.”

So here's where things stand right now.
I've been given a whole bunch of reasons why the parcels haven't been delivered, told to file claims and apply for compensation (yeah, we know, at most you'll get whatever was declared), but in reality nothing is moving, and customer support keeps coming up with new excuses.
By the way, if the parcels were stolen, then by dragging this out, customer support is covering up the theft. That's a criminal offense, isn't it, or am I wrong?

Anyway, I'll keep calling for now. Maybe the impossible will happen and I'll get what I've been waiting for since early December. If you have any advice, recommendations, or just comments (as long as they're clean), I'd be glad to hear them.

Update.
On December 29, I sent another set of messages to the claims department. This time, though, I selected “complaint” as the message type, explained the problem again, and said that if they continued to do nothing, I'd have to contact their head office in Poland.
I got a reply in the morning. Apparently, they finally decided to deign to answer a serf.


When I pointed out that I could get a refund without them through AliExpress, so I didn't understand what help they were offering, they replied even more tersely.
So their customer support kept stringing me along for more than two weeks, their operators blatantly lied, and this is what I get?


But later that same day, I got another reply, this time for some reason from meest-global. They decided to outdo Captain Obvious by giving me the phone numbers for... customer support, the same people I'd been calling every day for the past few days. They clearly have a sense of humor, especially since I described all of this in my complaint.


That same day, I replied to the claims department and asked who, exactly, was going to compensate me (quoted from my email).

But I got no reply. Apparently, they went off to celebrate New Year's and still haven't sobered up.

I won't even get into the fact that what they sent is a typical brush-off. As the saying goes, "you can't attach it to the case file," and in a situation like this they're supposed to provide an official response on paper, with a stamp. But here, the reply came from who knows who: no full name, no job title, no phone number, nothing...

That same day, the tracking status for both shipments changed to -
2022-12-29 UKRAINE Lviv 1/1 Shipment lost
CLAIM FORM

So you lost my parcel back on December 2–3, after it entered the country, let me change the recipient, lied to me over the phone, and then decided to make excuses at the end of the year? I still tend to think the parcels were simply stolen and that they're now covering up the theft.