Your shipping woes.
 

I realise that shit experiences with shipping is a universal thing in our fandom, and rather than clogging the SHFiguarts all the time, it seemed right to make a thread dedicated thread to vent your rage and frustration at shipping.

Come home to a Fee To Pay card on your mat like me? EIGHT POUND HANDLING FEE? If that wasn't bad enough, where'd the other four quid come from?

Got a parcel in some sort of void between Japan and your country like me? This tracking number is of so much use!

Buying orders with figures you aren't even interested in, just to try and make the extortionate shipping, customs and handling prices seem worth it, like me? God I can't wait to put the order filler in a suitcase to get lost!

This is your thread!

Yeah I think this thread will be used quite often :lol

So I finally got my Diesel Ressha. After almost a month of waiting since it was stuck in customs for like three weeks. The Customs Office for my region is a 1 1/2 hour train ride away which would have cost me eight euros for both rides. Then I would have had to walk another 40 minutes to get to the damn customs office.

So insted I mailed them everything they needed to process my order and then it took them almost two damn weeks to deliver the package to my door.

Yeah my post office is at some airport in the middle nowhere and you physically can't get there without either traversing multiple buses which will take hours or to drive - but I can't do that.

It means I have to do redelivery, but then as I work all week it means the days off I do have I have to sit inside by the window because the postmen come whenever the fuck they want and punish you for not waiting by the door like a dog.

I thought this thread was about character shipping :lol

Anyway, the worst shipping experience was when I ordered a large set of Mugenbine figures for around $150 (The price wasn't the issue. Shipping cost was about $50 (Which I added in to the final price) and I was getting, like, 22 of the 26 alphabet figures along with 2 other candy toys, and about 10 were MISB), but the problem came from the time frame. A week after I made the order, the tracking number said it was "In delivery" or something along those lines.

I didn't see those figures for 3 months.

For something a little more Toku related, I ordered the Orga Driver.
It came wrapped in bubble wrap. No shipping box. No signed delivery. Just the Orga Driver sitting on my porch wrapped in one small layer of bubble wrap. I was not a happy camper (It worked fine and included everything, so I got over it. That was still bullshit, though).

So my AC Kachidoki has been in the 'final delivery' stage for almost a whole week (I mean actual week, not a working one). What does this mean? It's lost? I didn't know stuff could get lost on the way to your house.

Either way, I'm never going with the more expensive shipping option again, it ended up nearly doubling the cost of my order and took longer than my SAL orders do.

Hoo boy, do not even get me started on Royal Mail handling fees. The whole over-£15-and-you-get-hit-with-20%-tax is bad enough to start with, but then they have the gall to slap another £8 onto that for handling? Makes it significantly harder to collect on a budget :/ -to the point where I've realised that when I buy things from now on it will be cheaper to have, say, two small items be shipped seperately and end up paying the shipping cost twice, than it would be to ship them together and get hit with Royal Mail's tomfoolery. Anything over £15, as unfortunately most stuff is-I just let my wallet cry a little...

This isn't really a woe but more about a fact about importing I think sucks.

I was planning on just getting an HG 00 Raiser kit for my room (and I love 00 the show) and I was looking at the shipping cost. It cost like 2/3rd the cost of the kit just to ship.

Point of the story, wait until you get more money to buy more so you could save on shipping.

Also, HLJ will no longer offer SAL when you want to order items, even if its a small amount. Again, looking at the theoretical shipping cost of shipping 4 HG gundam kits (which is a realativley small size physically) they only offer Ems and up.

I had a box shipped SAL, it finally hit customs, in normal time. But! After it went to Memphis for sorting to my town, it went to a town 40 minutes away from me yesterday. So instead of my getting it yesterday like I should have, I have to wait until monday.

I guess Mari's dad couldn't afford a box on that one.

I'm going to say that I've had mostly good luck with not getting hit with import fees. It's happened once or twice but was minimal. I do avoid shipping with UPS or Fedex so that helps.


I had a package coming to me (from the US actually) last month and it made it past customs just fine, got two hours from my house, and then was shipped back to the US. Looking at the tracking number I was like "what the hell is going on?" Turn out that once it crossed the border Canada Post put a tracking barcode on it, as is tradition, but the idiot at the package sorting facility slapped it right over my address. They couldn't see where it needed to go so they sent it back. USPS wouldn't reship for free since the problem wasn't on their end. I ended up splitting the cost to reship with the seller since it wasn't either of out faults.

Canada Post just generally stinks. Their website will give you a price to ship something and then when you actually go to ship it the price is way higher for no reason.

The mail delivery person we used to have was also very cool but someone new has had the route for the last couple of months. The new woman doesn't even knock when there is a package. Actually, she often doesn't even bring the package, just puts a notice to pick it up at the post office even when it would fit in the mailbox. The old lady used to just leave it on my doorstep for me.


All this brings me to the fact that I have some stuff in my Private Warehouse at HLJ and it's enough to make a good order, especially after their clearance sale. Problem is that I have one preorder for next month but I have an item that is days away from their 60 day limit so I will have to ship my order now. Not a big deal but it would nice if they'd hold it longer.

UPS continues to get ridiculous. They finally get a system that allows packages to be held before a delivery attempt, but you can't request it. Not only do you have to sign up for their program, which seems to charge for any change to the standard delivery routine, but you have to have the sender make any change requests. What kind of sense does that make? I can imagine companies that do high volume sales will get pissed at constantly getting customer requests to have packages held and the like.

UPS and USPS continue to be the absolute worst. (To be fair, my USPS driver is awesome, but the rest of the system sucks and she's retiring soon and I know I'll end up with a useless jackass.)

I know this is a woes thread, but I have to add a positive note because how often are you positive about shipping? Amazon have to be one of THE best people I have ever had to deal with online, they make everything so easy and they offer such a range of services and don't charge you through the nose for all of them. I now like paying the extra shipping, just because I know with Amazon it's worth the money.

Amazon has really been aggressive in giving customers a good experience. I wonder how their test markets are going for their own deliver service they are trying.

While not actually a woe under normal circumstances, I did have an experience with Amazon recently that actually would have been freaking incredible.

S.H. Figuarts Mario came into stock a week early and Amazon decided to begin processing all of the orders for it ASAP. Which means I got a pending charge and couldn't cancel.

Sounds great so far, right?

Well, I had planned for its shipment to coincide with my move and under the original release date, coupled with the slowest shipping option (still just 3-5 days - so I didn't even take advantage of my Prime!), it should have arrived a week later. Instead it was going to ship before I moved.

And it did. A few days after the initial email, on a Friday, it shipped. I moved in the following Monday. I thought it would still be okay because I picked the standard shipping.

It arrived Saturday morning. It was barely even 24 hours after being notified of shipping.

That is absolutely freaking fantastic! And why I love Amazon.

Except I was in another state across the country! >_<

Fortunately it does happen for people moving and the office was nice enough to hold it... but it was still embarrassing and I had to deal with my mother prying into what it was (since she was never going to see it and is always nagging about me buying toys)...

So in a sense, I'm a little upset because they didn't follow my expectations at all. I expected it to ship when the preorder release date indicated it should. So it came in stock earlier, okay.. But then you also have that expectation of shipping speed. If you pick a slower speed, it's usually for a reason and you probably want that wait, you know?

So I'm conflicted because I'm both impressed and a bit peeved that I didn't get what exactly I was asking for/expecting.

But at least I got my shit in the end.

So...I was supposed to get my SHF Cure Moonlight from Mandarake today, and it was marked as delivered, but my mom never saw the box this morning, so I texted OO about it, and he said that maybe it was accidentally confirmed for delivery...so I call my mom, and she tells me to call the 1-800 number, so I do...so I talk to that lady for a while, so one thing she tells me is to call my local post office to see if I can schedule a pickup, so I call them, and they say that the mailman is still on the truck, so I'm like "ok"...so fast forward about a half hour...and I get a call from a number I don't recognize I'm like "Maybe it's the post office" it wasn't I pick up the phone and it's some old lady and she's like "Is this *insert real name here*?" and I'm like "Yes, this is him..." and she's like "Were you expecting a package from Japan?" and I'm like "Yeah" and she's like "It was delivered to me...this is my address, you can come pick it up, and bring your ID" so, I go to the apartments, like literally a 3 minute drive) down the road, and the gate's locked, so I call the lady and she doesn't pick up, but some dude was leaving said apartments then, so I went in, and I looked for the place, and eventually come to the back area, and there's this old dude walking his dog, and he says "Looking for 32?" and i say yes, then he says "It's up there, yeah the mailman just left this at our door, and we didn't know why we got it" so i go up the stairs, and this old lady answers the door, so i give her my ID, and she gives it to me, and I was like "Yeah...that's my address, so I don't get it" and she was like "Yeah, call the post office" and i was like "yeah of course" then we just told each other to have a nice day, and I went on my merry way.

So yeah...that happened today. I'm just glad I have my Cure Moonlight.

Wow... Glad you still got Moonlight.

... that's seriously bizarre dude.

Glad it got sorted out though.

Thanks. Same here.

Yeah...

Thanks. :D

Oh, FedEx, usually you're so very good. First, I couldn't complete my usual practice of going online and having the package held at the local facility. I called them and was told the package was too large (?) but they could handle it from their end. Success! Following that, I got a call from them yesterday saying it would be available for pick-up this morning. Nope. In fact, it's still in Memphis where it has apparently taken 13 hours to get across the city and is just now apparently making its way south.

Granted, it's a very minor thing in the annals of shipping problems, but I had rather gotten myself excited for getting hold of the thing today. :(

And now I'm glad I live in the country.:lol

Does anyone know how Toys R Us sends boxed items? I've had bad experiences with them in the past with smaller items and don't want to repeat that mistake with something over 50 dollars.

Never mind, found it at their store.

Once again, the USPS is being very frustrating. I have two EMS packages (including Hibiki!) that arrived in Jamaica, NY from the ISC early Saturday morning. Neither package has moved since then and no one at the postal service can tell me why the delay. I understand the holiday slowed things up a bit, but it's into the third work day (possibly fourth, if the Sunday folks worked as normal) with no movement. I wouldn't mind if it were SAL, but EMS packages don't often get hung up like this, at least nowhere near as frequently as SAL boxes sit around.

Sorry for the double post, but I seem to be the primary person who has shipping was these days. My Drive TK - 01 and TK - 02 package has apparently gone berserk in the postal system. After being misdirected to Maryland and then sent to the wrong post office in town three times, it looks as though it may have been sent back to Japan and Mandarake. the last recorded location for it today was a postal station in town and I attempted to call over there to try to locate the package.

After being on hold for 20 minutes, I decided simply to drive over to the station and try to pick up the package. The same supervisor that put me on hold was waiting on customers at the counter despite the fact my phone was still connected and I had been on hold for 45 minutes. We had a bit of a vocal altercation at the counter and she refused to look for my package. According to someone at my local station, if it was not delivered properly this time it would be sent back as it is a registered package and they say they can only hold those for 3 days.

So, my rage is boundless today with all package carriers and DHL is playing into that by seemingly also having misplaced a package, this one containing just a lock seed. I just can't win today.