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

[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-...

[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?)