"Article explaining e packets" Topic

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I found this informative, infuriating, and discouraging. I sell bases, and sales have dropped a lot in a short period of time. So I did a quick search and found some coming from Hong Kong with free shipping at prices impossible to match.

I did some further research and online sellers around the world are getting hurt by the classification of China and Hong Kong as emerging economies who gets preferential rates.

This will continue to have an impact.

As a reference, my customers have to pay $22.50 USD to ship even a small order to Europe…………………….which happens almost never.

I've been asking myself the same thing for a few months now. It seems like the epacket is undercutting all US sellers on ebay too.

Dan
PS. I always tell my wife that, if I'm going shopping, I will stay in the area unless it's to buy things that I can't possibly find at local stores. In other words, I'd rather keep our local businesses running and our neighborhood from becoming a ghost town. I want to protect our property value. Same principle.

Interesting stuff.

If I paid Warbases.co.uk USD$22.50 to ship a parcel of bases to New Zealand, I would probably stop buying from them. That price in itself does seem excessive.

I just shipped a parcel from NZ to Sri Lanka. It weighed 4.1 kg, about 9lb in old money. It cost NZ$107 to post there. I doubt we are considered an emerging economy.

Your postal costs are about a fifth of what I paid, but I strongly suspect your parcel was not a fifth in weight of mine (1.8lb). In general, I have always found postal costs from the US, to be quite high.

When I or one of the group I game with wants to buy from the States, we club together, as the postal costs are so high.
I was talking to a guy at our club on Saturday, who prefers to buy from the UK (12,000 miles away) than Australia (1600 miles away) because the postage is cheaper.

Yours isn't the only weird thing about postal costs in the world today. But I feel your pain, it must be difficult.

Even better, there's an effort to force the USPS to raise its rates for packages. A research note from an investment bank says that FedEx and UPS have a $15 USD-19 billion "revenue opportunity" if the USPS is forced to raise its rates. Which means more money out of all of our pockets …

Looks like someone is going to have a look-

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Not going to hold my breath, but with the postal system under scrutiny it may be impossible to ignore the millions of packages they deliver at a loss from Asia.