Bleah. I see from your comments that you live in Germany; in the US, DNS used to do deliveries etc., but starting about when the Great Recession hit, they've pulled out of just about every business line they had here, except for delivering stuff from companies to our government US Postal Service ... which they do worse than UPS or Fedex, Amazon doesn't in fact use them for this, I just directly notice this from some Amazon merchant booksellers.
A "box that looked as if some animal chewed on it" ... I think we have a higher population of animals who can do this, clearly no excuse for Germany ^_^. Seriously, after carefully considering various alternative vendors for a wall air-conditioner I new for my new home given my various constraints, I ordered one from Amazon, and UPS wasn't gentle on the box, even lost on of the 4 packing straps I'm pretty sure. But no damage except to a small section of the heating exchange fins, which never make it 100% anyway however you procure them, and can be tediously combed out. I've never regretted a big ticket item purchase from Amazon like that.
Back to DHL: does not give an impression of a well run company given the USA and German datapoints; can anyone else fill in the gap in over there? I'd expect UPS to try.
There are plenty of alternative parcel delivery companies in Germany (UPS, DPD, GLS, Hermes), and they're all generally OK.
The worst experience I've had was indeed with DHL, where they apparently loaded my parcel on to the truck every day for about two weeks, but never attempted delivery. Eventually I worked it out with the sender, and DHL returned the original parcel to them.
Otherwise, I get dozens of parcels from DHL per year without incident. Every company has horror stories, and I doubt they differ too much percentage-wise in terms of loss and damage.
The really frustrating thing about all this is that DHL used to be the good company. The one where you could rely on the delivery. It changed abruptly for me. There was one good delivery and then the problems started and never ended. I even considered getting one of those Pack Station accounts. Good that I didn't. The experience colleagues had from this was shocking. Wrong packages, missing packages, messy support and recently that hack. Horrible.
I live in a big Germany city, so I hope that drone delivery hype becomes a thing one day.
A "box that looked as if some animal chewed on it" ... I think we have a higher population of animals who can do this, clearly no excuse for Germany ^_^. Seriously, after carefully considering various alternative vendors for a wall air-conditioner I new for my new home given my various constraints, I ordered one from Amazon, and UPS wasn't gentle on the box, even lost on of the 4 packing straps I'm pretty sure. But no damage except to a small section of the heating exchange fins, which never make it 100% anyway however you procure them, and can be tediously combed out. I've never regretted a big ticket item purchase from Amazon like that.
Back to DHL: does not give an impression of a well run company given the USA and German datapoints; can anyone else fill in the gap in over there? I'd expect UPS to try.