Unless ACME Corp. is hand delivering your product, you should be lodging these complaints with the logistics company. If you think it's ACME's problem, you can leave a negative review on the seller's page, but leaving a 0/5 on a product because it was late isn't really helping anyone, especially considering products can come from multiple sellers.

If it never shipped though...

Delivery tracking can be extremely misleading.

For instance, a sender can “create a shipping label”, and suddenly it has a tracking number and looks ready to ship soon. In reality, it may literally not even be in a box yet, much less anywhere near a shipping warehouse! Things can stay in these limbo states for weeks and claim to be “shipping” or whatever else. Not to name names but ReserveBar did this to me and I’m still bitter about it (ended up cancelling an order after being lied to about its true state of shipment for over a month).

I used to ship ups back in the day. They gave us software that was connected to them. We could request a shipping label and provide an address. This makes it trackable. We print out the label and put it on the box of the computer we were to build before shipping. Sometimes we had to wait on hard drives or CPU’s because we were out. Then we would qa it for 24 hours before putting the sticker on the box and giving it to ups at 5:15. A week your label was traceable but in reality it wasn’t going anywhere. Once ups picked it up you had regular updates.

I recently went to work for a drop ship company and ups and fedex labels still have a preship phase. This company we had labels printed while we waited for merch to arrive 3 weeks later!

If the company is upfront about that, then I'm fine with it. When I get a shipping number and then no activity and no communication for a week I assume I got defrauded.

I recently did two orders where this type of thing happens. One (an ebay order) the company sent me a notice a few hours latter that my product was damaged and no more stock would arrive for a month could they cancel the order. The other (new egg third party) there was no communication for a week despite a shipping label, so I contacted newegg and demanded a refund. I might order from the first company again, the second put a bad taste in my mouth and I probably won't use newegg at all anymore just because they are not policing their sellers.

Ok but you weren’t. It clearly says “shipping information received”. Not “product has been picked up by ups”

Also ups does not notify you so don’t expect communication from them they will tell you to call your shipper. If the shipper doesn’t respond to you well... that has nothing to do with the UPS shipping process now does it.

I just realized the drop ship company printed labels early so it didn’t look like they were the slow ones. The idea is someone looks at the label sees “shipping something received” and then hounds ups for status updates and not the seller.

As a customer I care about when I get my package. I don't - and shouldn't - care about all those details you stated. Which isn't to say you are wrong, just that it is irrelevant.

Conversely, I once ordered an item that never cleared the initial "shipping" status even though I received it a few days later. I forgot about it, and a few months later Amazon refunded the purchase on their own.

I think there's a reasonable expectation that product reviewers account for which parts of the experience can be controlled by the seller. You presumably wouldn't leave a negative review on a digital music purchase because your internet access is extremely slow.

Granted, this can be a little fuzzy, since it might not even be clear which parts of the experience are controlled by Amazon, the product manufacturer, and other third parties. Receiving a counterfeit SanDisk SD card from Amazon is almost certainly not the fault of SanDisk, yet a lot of people might leave negative reviews on an Amazon listing if they receive a counterfeit product. That's understandable despite it not exactly being "fair" to SanDisk.

I'm sorry, but if they're shipping by the three major carriers (plus amazon itself), barely anybody cares about the review. We all know problems in shipping occur. We don't need to filter the less than 1 percent of problem reviews because you were too impatient or too upset with life to wait 2 more days for a reshipment.

Why are you assuming they shipped anything?