Ninja Van is a logistics courier service in Singapore doing deliveries.

The service is often used by online retail sites such as Lazada and Love, Bonito to deliver goods to customers.

You can see Ninja Van listed as delivery /courier partner to these sites:

Started as a courier solution

Founded in 2014, Ninja Van was started as a result of founder Lai Chang Wen, who formerly had a menswear store, running into problems with unreliable courier services, delaying or losing packages.

Ninja Van's success story was even written by Channel NewsAsia.

The company started from little to no knowledge of logistics at all, to Ninja Van being successful enough to begin expanding overseas, having received US$30 million in 2016 from investors.

Their success story seems like a short-lived one, however.

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Complaints

Recently, the company has been on the receiving end of numerous negative reviews from customers.

One customer, Adrian Toh, wrote to Mothership.sg, complaining that his delivery of kibbles for his dog had been repeatedly rescheduled.

Toh was kept waiting in vain for his delivery, which was originally supposed to have arrived on Nov. 24, 2017.

Eventually, he was informed that the kibbles were returned back to the sender, which means Toh never got his order.

Many other cases

Toh also shared with us that his case was not isolated.

Reviews online on an unofficial Ninja Van Facebook page have been overwhelmingly negative:

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A search on Facebook would lead one to various complains about Ninja Van's services:

On Google, it's even more exaggerated.

With more than 4,000 reviews on their service, most echoing negative sentiments and bad experiences, with some complaining about how their rating still averaged 4.3 stars out of 5.

Official response

In light of all the negative reviews, and in response to Mothership.sg queries, Ninja Van said:

It has been the peak season for Ninja Van this past month and 11/11 sales has been very successful, contributing to a huge spike in parcel volume during this period. We have been working round the clock to clear this backload of orders.

With regard to Adrian’s case, we have investigated and are deeply apologetic for his non-delivery of dog kibbles. Unfortunately, there were some issues with our drivers and we have taken the necessary discipline against them. Moving forward, we will also try to prevent similar incidents from occurring by adopting stricter screening processes when recruiting drivers in future.

Just to clarify that we have never had an official Facebook page for Ninja Van Singapore. However, we understand that there were accounts created by impostors. We have tried to reach out to them to remove the page but to no avail.

This is not unlike Ezbuy's woes as of late, with thousands of unfulfilled orders thanks to Nov. 11's Singles' Day sales.

But with or without the Singles' Day 11/11 sale, many customers will naturally view what happened as something beyond a high volume of parcels, which in Ninja Van's case, may be partially attributed to the drivers.

Until Ninja Van can finally placate the many customers who are tired of waiting for parcels, perhaps retailers and customers should exercise due caution by choosing other methods of delivery when possible.

Top image via Ninja Van's website