Certainly seems shady…
I’m in Canada and when ordering anything from the US I avoid UPS if I can. I absolutely hate that company. Their customs brokerage fees are ridiculous. I ordered a pair of VeloVetta shoes a couple years ago and their ‘brokerage fee’ was close half of what I paid for the shoes. I refused shipment and VeloVetta re-sent the shoes via USPS/Canada post and the total customs charge I believe was less than $20.
This year I forgot that lesson and didn’t ask about who the shipping company would be when i ordered stuff from Wove…the UPS Brokerage fee was close to half of what I paid Wove. I complained to Wove and they gave me a discount, but it totally wasn’t their fault.
UPS suuuuuuucks
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The extra bucks is the fee they charge you for paying someone to process the package with customs.
It would be like to getting charged sales tax, then getting charged a bookkeeping fee on the sales tax, hah.
But that’s the way it is. My favorite is when customs inspects a delivery and then charges you by the day to store it in their very costly facility during the inspection.
Yeah I just thought it should have been 10 or 20%, not both. Probably 10 since sports suitcase is more specific.
It was Wove’s fault because they chose to use UPS.
So does UPS just pocket the difference between what they charged you and what they actually give the government as pure profit?
UPS shows custom fees and their brokerage fee separately. Their brokerage fee in my experience is significantly higher than the customs fee
This has more to do with the Orange Turd you have for a President than Huub.
He has managed to single-handedly f00k up the whole worlds economy and add an extra level of bureaucracy and associated fees on shipping to here, there or anywhere.
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Oh don’t get me started on that sh!t stain. However Huub had the opportunity to provide good (or even just adequate) customer service and failed miserably. They also appear unwavering and inflexible about always using UPS as their international shipping service. As Jim said above, that is their fault. Aerocoach is a perfect counterpoint - another UK tri/cycling company but they use royal mail for smaller items and these items sail through customs without any fees whatsoever. And I’ve asked them many questions and always get a response within 12 hours.
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I’ve had poor customer service from Huub as well. Definitely not a company I’d buy from again.
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Thanks Jim
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No. The 10% rate is because it’s from the UK and that’s the ‘country’ tariff that has been added - if it had been from other places then that could have been much higher.
BUT that’s additional to the specific goods tariff. Those were always there and unchanged, the national rates haven’t replaced those tariffs.
As for shipping costs and import duty, welcome to my life of being a strong advocate and supporter of De Soto from outside the US (into both UK and NZ). I don’t blame De Soto as they have no say/influence over this.
I did get DHL trying to charge me a fair bit once for doing the customs clearance for me-turns out it was a simple case of filling in a form, dropping it at the local customs office, paid the $25 duty, and they cleared the package and told DHL to deliver it. That saved me $150nzd. You do need to be prepared to do some reading and a helped that I live in a coastal town with a customs office readily available.
You should ship your international packages with USPS.
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Jim, this probably could have been sent in a private message to me, rather than writing assuredly publicly that it was our fault and what we ‘should’ have done.
The order was placed with a request for rushed shipping. UPS is the best choice for rushed shipping. USPS is on/off again shipping to Canada due Canadian Union of Postal Workers being on strike. Last, USPS consistently loses rushed packaging. consistently.
While USPS is often the best choice for Canada and it is what we typically use, we do not use USPS when rushed shipping is selected nor when there is a strike within the Canadian postal service.
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Agree. Beyond the scope of this post, but USPS has many issues. UPS usually gets the product through customs, quickly, which is why you have to pay so much more for it.
Even if 90% of the time USPS goes off without a hitch, what people don’t understand is that 10% of time, can be very costly for a company to deal with. Few companies are sitting around with spare time and employees with excess capacity in their work day to handle various exceptions, issues, lost packages, traces, claims, follow-ups, etc. that those 10% of USPS issues result in. That pushes cost back onto the company in ways that aren’t seen.
That said, there’s obviously a real cost to upset customers posting online, and emailing grumpily to the company as well!
Typically once a year, I buy a big supply of Conti tires from starbike . com and have never paid a penny in customs. They’re marked for personal use, not resale, so that my have something to do with it. Strangely, StarBike has a sliding scale for shipping, and the more you buy, the less the shipping is. They use DHL for the international segment, then it’s USPS once in country. Amortizing the shipping across all the tires, it sometimes adds as little as $5 per tire. That sounds excessive, but considering their prices are significantly less than US prices, it’s well worth it.
Thank you and this is spot on with regard to this not being a simple solution.
We do spend too much time on the phone with shipping providers each week, usually without any success of refunds or resolution. Like the 100 saddles stuck in customs for 14 days two weeks ago that had been sent to us two-day mail … no compensation for that delay.
The customer in the original post was great and understanding about it and I’m glad we got it resolved. Pretty much all customers have been really appreciative of our responsiveness and availability - it’s not hard to provide, but it goes a really long way.
What shipping options do you offer for international customers?
Again, I do think this is deserving of a private conversation. We offer UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL. But, I am just not interested in having this conversation publicly and I’m sorry that you are not understanding that. Best of luck.