Appalling service From First Freight, its no wonder you have a rating of 1.3 stars on Hellopeter, beware people, service delivery and client satisfaction is not on their agenda.

I placed an order with a supplier who only allows couriers to collect on Wednesday 13th August, goods were collected the following day by First Freight, given that it was an over night service I was expecting to receive the parcel on Friday 15th August and just for a little context the supplier is exactly 3.3km from First Freight, my delivery address is 25km from First Freight so we are not talking about massive distances, by 3pm I had still not received the parcel so I called their call centre and spoke to Glenda at their Johannesburg branch, she said she’d call the driver to find out what time he is delivering who then confirmed that he did not have the parcel, she asked for my details and said she call me back, received a call back about 10 minutes later to say they cannot locate the parcel, I further explained that the order was for brackets used to secure solar panels and that the installation of the panels had already been done and that without these brackets with the looming storms heading our way I ran the risk of the panels being ********** the roof, she said she would see what she could do and call me back, I never heard from her again.

I called them back today at 9am to query the delivery and the first agent said she’d try track it and then hung up on me, I called back and got through to Glenda who confirmed that they could still not locate the package but would call me back once she had spoken to the supplier, she called back and reiterated the fact that First Freight were unable to locate the parcel and that they would collect a new order for the brackets from the supplier but could only deliver tomorrow, I reminded her of my predicament and explained that I needed it urgently and asked if it was not possible given the circumstances and relatively close distances involved if they could arrange a same day delivery to which she refused and said I should take it up with the supplier, I was annoyed that she was not prepared to do this as I felt it was both a fair and achievable request and was further irritated by the fact the she palmed me off onto the supplier who was not at fault and not in control of the delivery.

I guess these review don’t achieve much for the person if the unfortunate position but at least it’s a heads up to people out there to choose who they deal with carefully. Incidentally I run a large distribution business and one of the forwarders we use is First Freight, the service has always been relatively average and this is enough to convince me to close our account and stop doing business with them altogether, there are a lot of freight forwarders out there some of which are in desperate positions given the current state of affairs and I’d rather support those companies than the fat cat established businesses who couldn’t be bothered with deliveries like these that on face value are not worth their time!