Years ago, I ordered a Merlin R-harp - this is a full size floor harp without pedals (smaller than a pedal harp but still pretty big).
The maker made his own packing crates which he paid to have shipped back to him, which I thought was a bit odd at first but soon discovered why.
I happened to be out of town for 3 days during which the R-Harp arrived. There was a house AND a barn on the property, and the barn had a large covered sort of a porch. When I got home, I discovered the harp had been left SITTING IN THE MIDDLE OF A FIELD, not 30' from the barn and its protected overhang area. About the same distance from the house.
I immediately contacted the maker, after ascertaining that fortunately the harp did not appear to be damaged. Fortunately for me and the harp it had not rained, in the season of heavy rains in that area, before I got home.
He informed me, with considerable apparent resignation, that this was par for the course for any courier service he had ever tried (this happened to be UPS). Which is why he started making his own packing crates specifically designed to minimize any possible damage they could do in shipping. These crates were engineered of plywood approved for use in aircraft manufacture and it was cheaper for him to have them shipped back than to construct new ones for each harp. Plus what was the end consumer going to do with the crate after unpacking the harp anyway.
Pretty appalling. And yes. It is SUPER hard to get them to cough up when they screw up. For example - my son once bought a new computer, and he and I both sat in his living room waiting for it to arrive on the day it was due, sitting RIGHT NEXT to the front door. It never came. UPS refused to talk to my son about it because he wasn't the shipper. They did go far enough to call him a liar. I got on the phone (he was like 19 and in college at the time) and you better believe I forced a lot more info out of them than THAT, but still failed to get satisfaction.
It was Friday evening by the time we had determined the package had been lost, and the seller was closed until Monday. However the person to whom the package had been misdelivered, FORTUNATELY, voluntarily brought it over to us the next day. He had not been home when the package came and his roommate, assuming it was for him, signed for it when he was away.
Turns out the delivery guy for that area was notorious for leaving packages at the wrong apartment buildings. When the seller contacted my son on Monday, they, too, seemed resigned to UPS and other such courier incompetence.
We were just lucky that the people to whom it was misdelivered were honest enough to turn it over, because UPS outright called my son a thief and a liar. They would NOT have owned up to their own mistake.