Ebayers.....If you ship to USA read this

[jsc15]

I send a fair amount of stuff to USA and if you don't already know, the USA has threatened to pull out of the Universal Postal Union, where prices/services are reciprocated between countries, and the US from 1st July is setting it's own (much higher) prices

Net effect is that Royal Mail have to set up a "World Zone 3" especially for USA and they now are blocking any letters and large letter with a commercial value from July 1st

Here's the new rates (replacing the old rates that were only in place for 3 months)...
https://www.royalmail.com/sites/royalmail.com/file...

I'll be switching off US sales for the forseeable future as a result, and probably Australia too as nothing seems to be getting there even as cargo

Edited by jsc15 on Sunday 28th June 19:42

[Simpo Two]

No doubt one of its competitors will says 'Thanks!' and step into the breach soon enough.

[jsc15]

Simpo Two said:

No doubt one of its competitors will says 'Thanks!' and step into the breach soon enough.

I think the issue is this would apply to anyone else too, i.e. it's the US raising rates for their end of the delivery, apparently to squeeze out heavily subsidised cheap packages from the likes of China, so Royal Mail are forced to increase UK to US prices to account for the US demanding a heftier proportion of revenue on incoming mail

This is an older CNBC article from Sept 2019 but seems to cover a lot of info...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/25/postal-compromise-...

[DSLiverpool]

Transglobal express have preempted this and have a solution. If it’s not on the website message them.

[The Moose]

If you’re looking for a warehousing solution to then dispatch orders from, shoot me a PM. I work with a few online European businesses from outside the USA.

[Drawweight]

Ouch.

Those are some price increases.

I used to send a lot of large letters/small parcels abroad at a flat rate of £3.50.

It worked fine, some you made money on, some you lost on.

The USA rates would be a game changer tho’

My customers wouldn’t pay 8 quid postage for a 4 quid tea tea towel.

[The Moose]

Drawweight said:

My customers wouldn’t pay 8 quid postage for a 4 quid tea tea towel.

Would the pay 6 quid, but not 8?

[Drawweight]

The Moose said:

Drawweight said:

My customers wouldn’t pay 8 quid postage for a 4 quid tea tea towel.

Would the pay 6 quid, but not 8?

I suppose I wouldn’t know till I tried but on the whole I’d say no.

We used to charge £3.50 flat rate of postage worldwide (including U.K.) but a few years ago decided on free U.K. and 3.50 worldwide.

Of course we put the prices up to cover the postage and as soon as a customer bought more than one item per order we were quids in plus the number of orders shot up.

Postage costs are tricky things. It depends a great deal on the cost of the item itself. At present I’m into building scale models and looking at aerosol paints . Some retailers are charging 6 quid postage to send a small aerosol tin from Germany which is about the price of the paint itself. At those prices they are immediately clicked off.

[The Moose]

Drawweight said:

The Moose said:

Drawweight said:

My customers wouldn’t pay 8 quid postage for a 4 quid tea tea towel.

Would the pay 6 quid, but not 8?

I suppose I wouldn’t know till I tried but on the whole I’d say no.

We used to charge £3.50 flat rate of postage worldwide (including U.K.) but a few years ago decided on free U.K. and 3.50 worldwide.

Of course we put the prices up to cover the postage and as soon as a customer bought more than one item per order we were quids in plus the number of orders shot up.

Postage costs are tricky things. It depends a great deal on the cost of the item itself. At present I’m into building scale models and looking at aerosol paints . Some retailers are charging 6 quid postage to send a small aerosol tin from Germany which is about the price of the paint itself. At those prices they are immediately clicked off.

It's interesting, because in the US, the free and next day shipping is much less common.

As a small retailer, you don't seem to have access to the same flat rate deals as you do in the UK. I just paid $30 to have a $150 order shipped to me. But it's coming from 3,000 miles away.

People seem happier to pay more for shipping here which is why I was surprised that you said they wouldn't pay £8 when I thought it would be about £6 previously.

[dangerousB]

DSLiverpool said:

Transglobal express have preempted this and have a solution. If it’s not on the website message them.

We send around about 4000 consignments a year to the States and are currently talking with them. We've also spoken with (but discounted) GFS - the big sticking point is the multi channel portal.

Click and Drop (I have to say) is brilliant for automating everything. One thing we most certainly do not want to be doing is manually creating CN22 forms or having to actively search for the pertinent information we need.

GFS's software just didn't fit the way we work - fingers crossed Transglobal's does (or can).

Any other options that anybody's aware of, I'm all though - these Royal Mail price increases will cost us the equivalent of a rather amazing jetski in the next 12 months if we don't do anything and I know what I'd rather spend my money on!

[jammy-git]

The Moose said:

People seem happier to pay more for shipping here which is why I was surprised that you said they wouldn't pay £8 when I thought it would be about £6 previously.

My brother (who owns an ecommerce business and ships a lot of small value orders to the US) explained to me last night that there is no longer a large letter option, everything now is effectively a parcel. So his small orders that used to be shipped for £3-4 as large letters, are now parcels and with the price increase on top, are costing nearly double.

[The Moose]

jammy-git said:

The Moose said:

People seem happier to pay more for shipping here which is why I was surprised that you said they wouldn't pay £8 when I thought it would be about £6 previously.

My brother (who owns an ecommerce business and ships a lot of small value orders to the US) explained to me last night that there is no longer a large letter option, everything now is effectively a parcel. So his small orders that used to be shipped for £3-4 as large letters, are now parcels and with the price increase on top, are costing nearly double.

Sounds like it's worth looking at shipping from within the US...especially for low value orders.

[jsc15]

Thanks for the replies everyone, I don't think I've got sufficient volume to involve a third party operation though

It looks like this was done by Trump to cutoff Chinese packages that were paying very little towards US Mail for their side of delivery, but the knock-on effects to legit operations are significant.

The loophole (that I can see) seems to be that if, e.g. you're sending a CD with package weighing 120g total, previously it was £5.30 as Large Letter but is now £9.84 as Small Parcel (as a minimum package size), but this is only if you're declaring a "commercial value". Short of declaring everything as "gift" I'm wondering if low value items would somehow come under a media rate equivalent, a bit like how "printed papers" can be sent at a much reduced rate (I think without a customs label?)

[jammy-git]

jsc15 said:

Thanks for the replies everyone, I don't think I've got sufficient volume to involve a third party operation though

It looks like this was done by Trump to cutoff Chinese packages that were paying very little towards US Mail for their side of delivery, but the knock-on effects to legit operations are significant.

The loophole (that I can see) seems to be that if, e.g. you're sending a CD with package weighing 120g total, previously it was £5.30 as Large Letter but is now £9.84 as Small Parcel (as a minimum package size), but this is only if you're declaring a "commercial value". Short of declaring everything as "gift" I'm wondering if low value items would somehow come under a media rate equivalent, a bit like how "printed papers" can be sent at a much reduced rate (I think without a customs label?)

If you have a VPN, check out the Last Week Tonight episode published a few weeks ago on the USPS. Goes a lot into the reasons why Trump seems to hate the postal service and his incorrect assumptions about the organisation!

[The Moose]

jsc15 said:

The loophole (that I can see) seems to be that if, e.g. you're sending a CD with package weighing 120g total, previously it was £5.30 as Large Letter but is now £9.84 as Small Parcel (as a minimum package size), but this is only if you're declaring a "commercial value". Short of declaring everything as "gift" I'm wondering if low value items would somehow come under a media rate equivalent, a bit like how "printed papers" can be sent at a much reduced rate (I think without a customs label?)

I don't know if the requirements for 'Media Mail' are the same for International as within the US. If you're sending within the US, there is a discounted rate for media.

From the USPS site...

Here's what you can send:

Books (at least 8 pages)
16-millimeter or narrower width films
Printed music and test materials
Video and sound recordings
Playscripts and manuscripts
Printed educational reference charts
Medical loose-leaf pages and binders
Computer-readable media

NOTE: Video games, computer drives, and digital drives do not qualify for Media Mail prices.

My local postmaster has told me they get quite upset if you take the piss out of their media mail pricing. Who knows what they do for international.

Purely by chance, I have to sent an item by media mail today. I just looked and the price is $2.80 as opposed to $8.12 for a parcel service.

[cheekymeerkat]

I just bloody hope this happens in reverse. Will Royal Mail be significantly increasing charges to the USA for UK bound parcels?
Trump has dampened our export market to the USA so I don't see why we shouldn't do the same back.

The UPU Terminal Due's system has been skewed since it's inception decades ago. For people who don't know, this is how it works:
- Royal Mail will deliver most inbound international mail at a loss within the UK
- To recoup this loss, Royal Mail heavily mark up the outbound international postage costs when sending parcels from the UK to abroad.
- This makes Royal Mail a "Net exporter", which means overall they financially benefit from this "system", despite losing millions on inbound packets.

In other words, if you send a lot of parcels abroad and you use Royal Mail, you're being ripped off to pay for all the loss making inbound parcels.

This is how it works for most of the big countries in the western world.

Read for yourself:
https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/docume...

[Silverage]

Apart from the US now, I wouldn’t agree that RM massively mark up outgoing international stuff. We send 100s of packets out per day and there is not fortunes of difference between a 24 domestic and a small packet to europe.

Where it needs sorting out, and this is what Trump is doing and we are just caught up as a side-effect of his action, is the massively subsidised Chinese deliveries. We’re all paying the price now so Chinese sellers can pay literally pennies to post tonnes of, let’s be honest, tat to us. This is not what the UPU was designed for.

[jammy-git]

I'd argue it's exactly what the UPU was designed for.

[Silverage]

I don’t think it was designed to allow Chinese sellers to be able to dump stuff worldwide because postage only costs them buttons, subsidised by domestic postal services.

[Brianstorm]

It is only the price of parcels that have gone up, letter rate prices to USA are still the same for Zone 3 and most large letter rates have actually come down in price.