Shipping Adventure
Some time ago I was talking about hot chocolate and how hard it is to get specific brands to be shipped to Australia. The pool of choices is small.
I've had my eye on mail forwarding services for awhile, but hadn't made the jump until now.
Thinking it would be a bit of fun, I thought I would use hot chocolate for the first test run, cheap to purchase, something I wanted and not much to lose if anything went wrong.
What is mail forwarding, why do I want it?
There a thousands of online stores around the world. A relatively small amount of businesses ship overseas to Australia, it's a pitiful number at best. Often charging ludicrous prices or only shipping a limited catalog of items.
Why don't they ship to Australia? I'm guessing it's because its inconvenient to them, given the small potential amount of orders, the cost of setting up alternative shipping methods, dealing with lost packages and additional customer support. It's probably not worth it.
Which is why mail forwarding systems are so great. The process is as follows:
- Sign up to a forwarding company.
- Get assigned your own physical address somewhere in the US which is basically the address of a huge warehouse and your own unique identifier, like Suite 59134.
- Shop as usual at an online store and instead of your local address, use the one that was assigned to you.
- As your package is shipped locally first, you need to pick a relevant shipping option which is usually pretty cheap.
- Wait for the package to be shipped and arrive at the depot.
- The forwarding company notifies you they received a package with your identifier (Suite 59134) and asks you how you want it shipped.
- The package is shipped a second time, this time to your real address.
Shipito
First I needed a shipping company, there are a whole bunch of them, each varying in services, pricing and customer experience.
I trawled through a couple of forums for an hour or so and ultimately decided on a company called Shipito. They had a bunch of negative reviews but the good far outweighed the bad.
Signing up was easy, all that was needed was a $8.50 deposit, which you can put towards your first package. There are 3 plan types, and given I was skeptical I went with the most basic, which doesn't require a monthly or yearly fee (which i'll go into later).
Immediately you get assigned your own personal address in the US (detailed above) and your account is ready to start processing packages that arrive for you.
Choosing the product
With the ability to choose any chocolatier in the US my options were HUGE!
I had a look around and found a couple of sites that aggregate all the brands into a series of pages, one of them being this one.
From their list I chose Woodhouse Chocolate a company based in the Napa Valley of California.
Ordering a sampling of hot chocolate at $42 and $16 2nd day shipping, it shipped a couple of days later.
Processing the package
Two days later it arrived at Shipito, you can notify them of an incoming package by giving them the courier tracking number (in this case from UPS) so they can process it quicker.
It's quite a strange feeling tracking a package that isn't actually coming to you, but to somewhere in another country where it will be in the hands of someone you don't know.
It is a requirement to fill out your own customs form for when the package arrives in Australia. This means specifying the value for the contents, whether it's a gift or merchandise and detailing what exactly is inside.
When the package arrives at Shipito, they actually take a couple of photos of your item, which is awesome! Seeing what it looks like before it gets to you is pretty cool.
They also offer an option to take photos of the contents in case you are worried it might have been damaged in transit or you just want to see what you are going to receive. This allows you to make sure you are getting exactly what you wanted, allowing you to return the package back to the company to avoid even longer transit times.
I didn't elect for this as it costs a couple of bucks and didn't see the need for it.
Another cool thing they offer is the ability to consolidate packages, this means they open your package and reduce extra material as much as possible, such as unneeded cardboard, excessive bubble wrap and so forth.
This is important if you want to keep shipping costs down, as not only does it reduce the weight but the dimensions of the overall package. The only caveat is it's only available if you sign up to the $50 yearly plan. Something I know I should do in the future as when my package finally arrived I learnt what was inside.
Finally, selecting the appropriate shipping option. Shipito weigh, measure and calculate all the available shipping options to Australia.
It was a fairly big package (what I wasn't totally expecting) so it ranged from $28 to $84.
The $28 option had neither insurance nor tracking, it would also take up to 25 days. I'm really not confident in shipping a package with no tracking, especially being the first package.
While on the other end of the scale you have the $84 option, with superior tracking and shipping time, arriving in less than 3 days, $84 for a $42 item though? That's nuts.
In the end I went with the cheapest option with tracking, USPS Priority Mail. Still expensive though. A couple of days later Shipito dispatched my package and it was on it's way.
Waiting period
USPS tracking is often delayed by several days, so it's hard to tell where the package is.
I have a tendency to refresh tracking pages several times a day, when is it going to arrive?!
There was a period of 8 days where there were no updates from USPS, starting to think my package disappeared the status suddenly changed, it was in Sydney and was delivered the next day.
It arrives
There the box was, what was going to be inside, would it be melted? What kind of heat conditions had it been in?
I opened the box to find a polystyrene enclosed case, the kind that looks like they transport medical organs in, inside was tons of bubble wrap, at the bottom was the hot chocolate.
Hugging the chocolate was a freezer pack long since removed from the fridge. More than 3/4 of the box was just bubble wrap, a lot of wasted space.
Potential
So the USD is pretty amazing right now, at the time of writing this (1st May 2011) its 1.096, or 1.00 USD = 0.911 AUD.
Your options are almost unlimited for stores in the US, there are very few that restrict international credit cards, even so this can be worked around if it's an important item.
Shipito have a page which list the most popular stores they receive packages from. Amazon of course tops the list, their catalog is mind boggling huge. Zappos and a lot of clothing companies follow, clothing is a major commodity, I imagine that's what most of the Amazon shipments are.
The entire list can be found here.
Costs involved
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Hot Chocolate | $42.00 |
| Shipping (domestic) | $16.00 |
| Mailout fee (handling) | $8.50 |
| Shipping (international) | $50.65 |
| Bank fee 4.3% | $2.18 |
| Total | $119.33 ($108.77 AUD) |
So what did I end up paying in the end? $119.33 USD or $108.77 AUD.
That's $77.33 ($70.49 AUD) in shipping fees.
If I had elected the cheapest shipping option shipping would have cost $54.78 ($49.93 AUD) or a grand total of $90.50 AUD.
It turns out that if I consolidated my package I could have saved a bit of money ($10-$20). The biggest problem is weight, 2 pounds instead of 5 is dramatic.
I've calculated if I bought 4 times as much chocolate, they would have used the same box therefore the weight would have increased to 20 pounds, USPS postage costs would have doubled but DHL would have remained close to what it originally was ($88), so I would have gotten more product, faster for a lower cost per packet of chocolate.
So buying in bulk is probably the most cost effective thing to do. If you were to buy clothes or shoes, I imagine shipping costs wouldn't be too bad.
Conclusion
In the end, everything went well, the hot chocolate was fantastic. I love that this kind of service is available and will definitely be using it again next time I can't get something shipped to Australia.
Just need to keep in mind how to strategically ship items, either by buying multiple things and shipping them all together or buying in bulk and making sure its in it's smallest box possible.