30
2011
Is UPS Mail Innovations a Good Option?
An article by shipsurance 
Review websites should never be the only place a consumer visits for information about a service. As a matter of fact, they usually only contain negative reviews as most people that are happy with a service rarely hand out positive reviews.
With that being said, we stumbled upon a review site, viewpoints, that had some pretty strong and opinionated reviews about the UPS Mail Innovations service. In a nutshell, what UPS Mail Innovations does is pick up your shipments, sort them, process them, then hand them off to the local USPS office for delivery. We have many shippers that ship with UPS Mail Innovations and insure their shipments with us. They are not problematic or have any more shipping claims than any other shipping carrier. We also get many questions about the service and whether they should be considered as an option. At Shipsurance, we do not tout one carrier over another as they all provide excellent services and have their strong points. However, we do want to share the link to the UPS Mail Innovations reviews so if you are considering using their service, you can understand what others have experienced first.
Please note, UPS Mail Innovations is not UPS, it is a separate company. Also, we insure many shippers that are happy with the service. We just want to assist businesses in researching their shipping choices.
The viewpoints review website is located here.
EDIT: It looks like viewpoints removed the reviews.
Not in a 1,000 years. The service sucks.
This is akin to Fedex’s “Smart Post” (which took over two and a half weeks to get a package sent from Las Vegas to Los Angeles at a cost well over what the USPS charges for Priority Mail shipping which is at most 3 business days) and is apparently equally as awful. There is no accountability from either UPS or USPS. The tracking number I was provided did not even register in the system as “accepted” until two days after the projected delivery date – which, of course, came and went without any sign of the package itself. At this point it has now a new estimated date of delivery projected in three days, though I don’t have a great deal of faith in it since the claim that the package should have been into the USPS system within 12 -24 hours was clearly false by a margin of days.
For this, I paid 4.00 shipping costs for a package Actual Weight of 0.1456 lb – ordered 1 week ago. I think a regular first class mail envelope containing the item would have been received yesterday from just about anywhere in the country for a tenth of the cost.
Use this garbage only if you wish to have bitter and resentful customers and whatever you do, offer an alternative and do NOT try to pass it off as UPS Ground service – which is much more efficient and probably comparable in cost.
The service is overpriced and extremely poor. I have a Post Office box since physical mail delivery is not provided where I live. I had two packages sent to me both were delcared undeliverable and sent back to sender without refund. Avoid using any parcel service that involves USPS.
I have no problem with either the USPS or UPS delivery, but the unholy combination of the two that is UPS Mail Innovations is a different beast. Despite the diagram for UPS Mail Innovations that seems to imply fewer steps and “expedited transport” when compared to USPS, packages are delivered MUCH, MUCH slower than those through standard USPS priority mail. Looks great on paper, but my experiences have been different.
I looked through literature on USP MI trying to determine exactly how much the vendor was saving over sending packages USPS priority mail, and from what I can tell they are actually paying -more- to ship USP MI!!! The docs I saw said 48 cents or 10% of priority mail rate was ups charge to deliver to the USPS DDE. Unless I’m missing something, I just don’t understand why any vendor would ever ship this way. It costs more for them, slower for the customer, and the tracking information is much less informative.
This service is so slow. It was shipped on a Tuesday and showed it arrived in my county on Thursday and was ready to transfer to post office on Friday. It was not transferred to my local branch until Wednesday and it was not delivered until Friday. It traveled over 1500 miles in 2 days but took a week to go 30 miles. Something is wrong with the logistics. I have had similar experiences every time I have something shipped via UPS Mail Innovations.
worse service ever my package went from IL to FL in a day but it has been at the post office for 3 days and has not moved…