The packing was careless and everybody blamed the journey

It arrived damaged, or crushed, or looking like something you would not want to sign for. The journey gets the blame, because the journey is long and involves machinery.

Machinery is rough and predictable. Anybody sending things knows exactly how rough it is, and packing for it is the job.

What preparation actually covers

• Whether the outer packaging survives being sorted by machines that are not gentle.
• Whether the contents can move around inside, because movement is what causes most damage.
• Whether the thing looks like ordinary post from the outside, at a glance, to a bored person.
• Whether smell is contained, which is a preparation problem and not a transit one.
• Whether the sender details are plausible and consistent with the origin.
• Whether the weight and shape match what the outside implies.

Every item on that list is decided at a table before anything is posted. None of them can be affected by what happens afterwards.

Why it reads as transit damage

Because damage is discovered at the end of a long journey and the journey is the vivid part. There is a whole imagined sequence of vans and conveyor belts sitting between the vendor and the doormat, and the mind puts the fault somewhere in there.

The journey is real and it is also a constant. It happens to everything. Two parcels take the same journey and one arrives fine, which means the difference was at the start.

Presentation is the part that matters most

Damage costs money. Presentation costs more than money. A parcel that draws attention to itself creates a risk that has nothing to do with whether the contents survived the trip, and it is the single most consequential thing a vendor decides.

This is worth judging coldly and early. If the first parcel from a vendor looked obvious, that is what their parcels look like. There is no reason to expect the second to be different and a good reason not to find out.

What follows from getting it right

The judgement moves from the event to the source. A transit story says this was unlucky and implies nothing about next time. A preparation story says this is what this vendor does, which is actionable.

It also changes what you write in feedback. Feedback about the post is useless to everybody. Feedback about how something was prepared is the most valuable thing a buyer can leave, and it is the kind that other buyers actually read.

Judging it before the first order

You cannot inspect packing in advance, but you can ask, and the answer is informative regardless of what it says. A vendor who has thought about preparation will describe their approach in specific terms without being pushed. A vendor who has not will say it is discreet and leave it there.

The other available signal is the feedback that mentions arrival condition rather than contents. Most feedback talks about the product. The small proportion that describes what the outside looked like is the part with information in it, and it is worth scrolling for.

• Back to the cases the vendor caused
• When it was a random inspection instead
• Every case in one table