PicUp vs Hunter Express.
Hunter Express is a long-established Australian freight and courier network. PicUp is built for one job: big & bulky last-mile into people's homes. This page compares the two on things you can verify yourself: the public review record, the product categories Hunter's transit cover excludes, and PicUp's own measured delivery performance.
- 99.95% First Day Delivery Success at scale in Brisbane metro.
- 98%+ DIFOT, and damage and lost parcel claims under 0.5%.
- 4.6★ from 489 Google reviews, against Hunter Express at 1.6★ from 1,342 (June 2026).
- Built for furniture, white goods and glass, the categories a parcel network struggles with.
Your carrier's failures become your brand's problem.
Before comparing any two carriers, be clear about what is at stake. Shoppers do not separate the carrier from the retailer. When a wardrobe arrives damaged or the delivery simply doesn't happen, the retailer wears it, in the review, in the support queue, and in whether that customer ever comes back.
of consumers hold retailers accountable for failed deliveries, not the carrier.
of consumers say on-time arrival is core to a great delivery experience, even more important than low-cost shipping or returns.
of consumers say a great delivery experience makes them return to a retailer, even if it costs more than competitors.
of consumers abandon carts when delivery isn't flexible.
of consumers would abandon a retailer permanently due to unresolved delivery issues or poor post-purchase support.
of first delivery attempts fail across the industry, on published estimates, depending on carrier and delivery type.
First Day Delivery Success is what PicUp holds against that benchmark, at scale, week after week.
Consumer statistics: Bringg blog post, The Top 3 2025 Last-Mile Trends and 2026 Outlook, January 2026. First-attempt failure range: published estimates of 8% (FreightWaves / OneRail) to 20% (Harvard Business Review). PicUp figure is our own measured performance, described below.
Read what the transit cover actually excludes.
This is the part of a carrier comparison most retailers skip, and it is the part that decides who pays when a sofa arrives with a leg through the arm. Hunter Express offers optional paid transit and indemnity cover to approved customers. That cover has a published exclusion list, and it reads like the catalogue of a furniture retailer.
“Terms, conditions and product exclusions apply including: (a) furniture; (b) household and personal effects; (c) white goods; (d) items containing glass; (e) Wine and alcohol in glass bottles; (f) Televisions & computer monitors; (g) Car, boat & all motorized vehicle parts …”Hunter Express, “Indemnity Insurance” panel, Additional Services. Quoted verbatim, partially, from the panel embedded across their site. Retrieved June 2026.
Two things are worth being precise about, because precision is the point of a page like this.
What this is
This is the exclusion list attached to Hunter Express's optional paid transit and indemnity cover for approved customers. Their transit insurance cover explicitly excludes furniture, household and personal effects, white goods and items containing glass. The list is prefaced with the word “including”, so it is not exhaustive.
What this is not
It is not a blanket statement that Hunter Express disclaims all liability, and we are not going to claim that it is. The fair reading is narrower and, for a furniture or appliance retailer, more pointed: the cover on offer excludes the exact product categories you would be hiring them to move.
Source: Hunter Express, Additional Services / “Indemnity Insurance” panel, hunterexpress.com.au, retrieved June 2026. Terms may change; verify against the current page before relying on it. This describes the exclusions applying to their optional paid transit cover, not their liability position generally.
The rating gap isn't a rounding error.
Customer sentiment is the one carrier metric you can check yourself, before you sign anything. Here is how the market looks on public Google reviews.
| Provider | Google rating | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| PicUp | 4.6 ★ | 489 |
| Capital Transport | 4.1 ★ | 429 |
| Hunter Express | 1.6 ★ | 1,342 |
| Allied Express | 1.4 ★ | 914 |
Source: public Google review listings, pulled June 2026. Ratings and review counts move over time. The Hunter Express score matters precisely because of the volume behind it: 1,342 reviews is not a small or skewed sample, and neither is Allied Express at 914. A rating that low, held across that many reviews, reflects a sustained pattern rather than a handful of bad days.
99.95% First Day Delivery Success, at volume.
Published estimates put industry first-attempt delivery failure somewhere between 8% and 20%, depending on carrier and delivery type. That is the benchmark our own measured performance should be read against. We do not publish first-attempt figures for Hunter Express or any other named carrier, because those are internal numbers we cannot independently verify.
Bulky last-mile for the leading global e-commerce platform
Challenge
A bulky last-mile partner was needed across the Brisbane metro region for a client with notoriously high delivery standards. Existing carriers could not meet first-delivery-success requirements, or deliver the fleet flexibility that sharp volume swings demand.
Solution
A fleet mix of 1T–2T vans servicing Brisbane Metro 7 days per week. Unique to PicUp, our DTC–B2B–B2B2C network lets the fleet flex as volume swings necessitate: surging when needed, pulling back when not.
Result
99.95% First Day Delivery Success, sustained across an average of 2,000 bulky last-mile deliveries every week.
Proven capability at scale: ~2,000 bulky deliveries per week
PicUp measured performance. FDDS is the share of deliveries completed successfully on the first scheduled delivery day. Industry benchmark: published estimates of 8% (FreightWaves / OneRail) to 20% (Harvard Business Review) of first attempts fail.
General freight and specialist bulky are different jobs.
General courier and freight networks are engineered for volume and speed across many parcel sizes. Big & bulky home delivery is a different problem: heavy, awkward items, a customer waiting at home, and a service moment that becomes part of your brand. Compare on these five things, and read the cover terms before the rate card.
- Item fit: is the network built for oversized, heavy and awkward goods?
- Cover: which of your product categories does the transit cover exclude?
- First Day Delivery Success and DIFOT for the bulky category specifically.
- Service tiers: room of choice, white glove, assembly, rubbish removal.
- Support: how fast a real person resolves an exception, and on which days.
The categories a parcel network struggles with are the only ones we do.
A general freight and courier model
Optimised for parcel volume across many sizes. Oversized and heavy items can attract layered surcharges, sit outside standard service tiers, and rarely include in-home options like assembly or rubbish removal. The delivery experience is built for throughput rather than the retail moment at the door.
The PicUp way
A network built only for big & bulky last-mile. Fleet from utes to 4T pantech with tail-lift, up to 3m and 150kg, 1-man or 2-man teams, and premium tiers as standard options. Furniture, mattresses, whitegoods and homewares are the core of the book, not an exception to it.
All tiers available 1-man or 2-man, with returns and reverse logistics, including the bulky returns most carriers refuse. See what white glove delivery actually covers.
Compare cost per successful delivery, not cost per attempt.
A quoted rate only tells you what one attempt costs. It says nothing about how often that attempt works, or who carries the loss when a bulky item is damaged in transit. Once you price in the failures, the cheaper carrier is frequently the expensive one.
The redelivery
A failed first attempt doesn't cost you nothing, it costs you a second run: another vehicle, another slot, another driver, often at short notice.
The support load
Every failure generates contacts. Your team fields the calls, chases the carrier, re-books the customer and absorbs the escalation, on your payroll, not the carrier's.
The brand cost
The hardest line to invoice and the most expensive. Reviews, repeat-purchase rates and lifetime value all move, and 47% of consumers blame you, not the carrier.
True cost per successful delivery = quoted rate + failed attempts + support cost + brand cost
Run your own numbers through that framework, with your own volumes and your own failure rate. A carrier quoting less per drop but failing more often does not save you money. It moves the cost somewhere your finance team isn't looking.
Reachable any day of the week.
When a bulky delivery needs intervention, the speed of the response decides whether it becomes a review. Retailers and their end customers can reach PicUp any day of the week, and nothing goes into a void overnight.
Human customer support. Real people, reachable by you and by your end customers.
AI agents answer and record every call, message and query. Anything unresolved is automatically flagged to our CS team to action first thing the following morning.
“Going the extra mile to deliver smiles to your last mile.”
The numbers retail brands trust us on.
Shortlisting more than one carrier? Compare PicUp vs Allied Express and PicUp vs ANC delivery as well. For the full picture, read our overview of last-mile delivery for bulky goods, or work through the checklist of things to look for in a bulky last-mile carrier.
Find out what your bulky freight is really costing you.
Bring your product profile, volumes and coverage. We will show you how a purpose-built bulky network changes first delivery success, damage and customer experience.
Book a Call with PicUp