[buymycards]

We have been seeing this a lot lately. The package gets accepted at a Post Office and it gets scanned at a processing plant near the Post Office, then it disappears off of the radar for a week, or 10 days, or 2 weeks. Then all of a sudden it shows up as "arrived" at the delivery Post Office and it gets delivered. It seems like for the past couple of months this has been happening more frequently. I wish I could figure out why is happening, but if you are patient, 99.999% of the packages will be delivered.

As far as an item not getting tracked at all, there are some problems caused by the mailers that contribute to this and I am seeing many, many of these.

First, replace the ink cartridge on your printer. The tracking hardware can't scan a bar code that is faded or that has some bars missing. You wouldn't believe how many of these I see every day.

Second, don't shrink the size of the label that is generated from eBay so you can save some paper and ink. We can't scan a bar code that is compressed and only an inch long.

Third, make sure the entire bar code is flat. We see a lot of labels that aren't applied correctly and the labels are wrinkled, which results in a couple of the bars in the bar code that are missing. We need to be able to scan all of the bars in the bar code.

Fourth, make sure that the bar code is on the address side of the package. These packages all go through machines and the machine will read the package label, but if the bar code is on the back of the package it won't get read.

Fifth, don't use glossy or colored paper for your labels. The glossy paper reflects the beam from the scanner and sometimes the scan is missed. Colored paper also causes problems, especially red paper. Don't tape over the bar code because of the reflection from the tape. Make sure you are printing the bar code with black ink.

I hope this saves you from some problems down the road. Remember that until the final delivery, all of the scans and processing are performed by machines and computers with very little human contact, so you need to make sure that everything is legible and machine readable.

Rick