US firms do that to the rest of the world too: some simply refuse to ship abroad. Why? Well I guess with a huge market easily accessible on their doorstep, they can sell all they want locally without 'being bothered' to deal with overseas shipping. It's very frustrating sometimes!
To be fair many of those 'firms' are one-man bands and unless they have multiple overseas orders at once they
probably don't find the extra time they have to spend at the post office worth it. Within the US they can use
the standardized priority mail boxes, you can get them delivered for free from USPS, print the postage on
your home printer and have the carrier pick'em up at your door. Most international packages have to be mailed
at the PO, which adds paperwork and time.
Jon, you can do all that here in the UK for domestic AND international post. With Royal Mail you still have to take it to the Post Office, but other carriers will pick it up from your house, or let you drop it off at an ever-increasing number of local shops that act as agents for them. You might have to fill in an extra two-line form for customs etc, but that's it.
Are you telling me that Fedex et al in the US don't pick up international packages at your door?
Um ya sure, as long as you don't mind being charged @ $100 for the shipping from here to there.
FedEX and UPS are not cost effective choices for the average Joe to ship intercontinentally,
which is what it is when you ship from the US to Europe, US to OZ, etc.
I sent a 5kg parcel to the US (y'know, intercontinentally) last year and it cost £23, picked up from my door. Can't for the life of me remember the courier because I booked it via Parcels2go.
Most companies world-wide charge extra (sometimes LOTS extra) for overseas shipment, but the US is the only place where I've seen companies just flat out refuse to consider it.
As far as customs are concerned, in the US it's more than a 'two-line form'. People really need to stop applying the norm where they live to the rest of the planet, it ain't the fucking same.
Given the propensity of Americans to assume that the rest of the world is like America and call it wrong/wierd when it isn't, that's fucking hilarious......
Especially hilarious as I'm only
American in the general sense of being from the northern continental mass of the Western Hemisphere.
From the other side of the coin I'm acquainted with a couple of small operators who have tried to offer 'overseas' ordering,
only to be roundly chastised and called a ripoff (and worse) when they've sent the potential customer the
at cost shipping quote. Which evidently happens fairly often. So no surprise many of them dropped the whole thing as not worth
the hassle.
Simply a matter of math(s)
Harold, while
you may be willing to literally
pay the freight, others are not
and react as if assaulted when asked to do so.
What really irritates
me is a couple of Brit specialist firms who refuse to update to the 21st century and still insist on doing
everything by post and bank transfers, which, BTW, cost an arm and leg over here, rather than email and CC, or preferably
PayPal.
Luckily in the one case I can get their product via a UK re-seller who doesn't live in 1820, in the case of the other, I've survived
this long without their product, so their loss.
BTW if you were charged £23, chances are it wasn't FedEX.
