Why your Lazada orders are flagged as delivered even if they’re not

During the last 11.11 and 12.12 sale on Lazada, Shopee and Zalora, a lot of people (including this author) have experienced multiple times their shipped items having been flagged as delivered and signed even if no one even received them at the assigned address.

This has caused a lot of frustrations and rants posted on social media. It seems that there were ghost deliveries, or worse, someone else was given the package without proper verification from the assigned courier of Lazada.

My inbox during the Lazada/Zalora 12.12 Sale.

Lazada has a proper tracking system for this and it shows the entire process from processing to shipment and actual delivery. They even include the date and time of the delivery with a scanned copy of the signature of the supposed recipient.

However, the signature seems to be random, sometimes almost scribbles of a mindless child.

We’ve seen signatures that looked more like child’s scribbles.

Worse, some delivery time stamps showed the items arrived past midnight.

In the last 12.12 sale, we ordered over 50 items between December 10-13 from Zalora and Lazada. For 90% of the time, the items arrived on time and in the proper manner. In some occasions, the delivery guy would call very early in the morning (around 6 or 7-ish AM) to verify if someone is at home to receive delivery. In one instance, they called around 6PM stating that they could not deliver that day due to the system being down in their warehouse.

In other instances, the Lazada app notified me that items have been delivered but when we double checked, there was no delivery made. This happened twice during that week. A few other people in the team also experienced the same.

So we investigated further and asked questions. As it turns out, these incidents were purposely done by the delivery guys. No missing items, no misplaced deliveries or theft. In our case, there were around 3 couriers between Lazada and Zalora that frequent our headquarters so they’re very familiar with our address and me as the recipient.

It’s just that there were too many deliveries for that day so the courier signed off the items as delivered. They will then fulfill the delivery the next business day. Perhaps, they are doing this to maintain an SLA or avoid getting penalized for delayed deliveries?

Eventually, the items that were flagged as delivered finally arrived after a day they were signed off.