Particularly for international shipments, it is important to make sure that your shipping address is correct. Here are a few guidelines to make sure that your order is not delayed due to an unclear shipping address - or worse still, returned to me.
While you see headings like "Name", "Company" and so on - the seller does not. This is important for international shipments, particularly to countries like the UK, where street addresses do not have a number (it blows my mind that this could possibly work - but apparently it does), it can be unclear whether a line is the company name, or the first line of the address - however for international shipments, I need to specify whether a line is the company name or the address. If it is at all plausible that I would mistake a line of the address for a company name, add a note clarifying this with your order; remember that I am an American, and not a particularly worldly one - I spend my time holed up designing and building electronics.
Similarly, if your address is particularly long, it may not clear where the "address" ends and the city or province begins. Is that a long address, city name, and no province, or shorter address, city, province? Again, clarify if it may be confusing.
While, obviously, I declare the lowest value I can legally, unlike vendors shipping from China, I cannot straight up falsify customs declarations. Depending on the import laws of the destination country, you may be responsible for import duties.
Addresses containing non-english characters are not accepted by our carrier (accents are usually okay; where they aren't, I replace them with the non-accented letter); please use the romanized form of your address.
Including a company name when shipping to a commercial address has (rarely) led to packages being undeliverable - usually it works, but occasionally it doesn't, and packages get returned to me.
International shipments require a phone number. My shipping portal sometimes rejects phone numbers which don't include a country code; this can delay shipment. Unfortunately, despite having the phone number, they don't seem to actually call it when there are delivery problems.
The number one reason that packages are returned, by far, is that the destination postal service reports that the address does not exist.
Because the "carrier" is USPS, Tindie's tracking link points you to the USPS tracking portal. We ship using the Global Advantage program, which allows us to offer lower shipping rates via electronic customs clearance (now required for international mail to be shipped via the "large/thick envelope" rate, which is about half of the next cheaper option - which isn't even any faster! They have their own tracking service, which graphically shows the location of your package, and provides better tracking of customs clearance progress and progress through the postal service of the destination country: https://www.goglobalpost.com/track/
Some rural regions do not have normal mail delivery. If you live in such a location, you are probably familiar with the rigmarole - however, sometimes we still get orders to these addresses. Our shipping partner flags these potentially problematic addresses, and we will not ship to them, and will contact you for an alternate shipping address (delaying your order). We can ship to P. O. boxes; we cannot ship to addresses that USPS doesn't deliver to.
Our initial experiences with our shipping partner have been less than successful - and shipping direct through UPS, for reasons not entirely clear to me, costs about three times as much. We are working to resolve these issues, and will announce it when it is available.
International First Class Package is barely faster than International Economy - but it is a lot more expensive. The main reason to use International First Class Package is if you live in a country like India, where International Economy packages just plain don't arrive.
While the COVID-19 situation has thrown a monkey-wrench into all international shipping (though things have been returning to normal, slowly), even in the best of times, shipping to certain parts of the world via International Economy and International First Class Package can be bizarrely slow. Typical times (before the pandemic) were:
- Europe, UK, Canada: 7-10 days. Usually a bit longer for Italy.
- Most of the rest of the world: 2-3 weeks
- South and Central America (even Mexico, just across the border): 4-8 weeks. Customs in these regions seems to just sit packages for weeks at a time, almost every time. It is not uncommon for packages to go for a month without a tracking event!
- Africa and India: 4-8 weeks - I don't know how much of this is capricious customs officials, and how much is the state of logistics in general in these regions.
- I have not shipped sufficient volume to other countries to have a good sense of shipping times. Of course, since COVID, these times are often significantly longer. Australia's postal service seems particularly hard-hit; a package shipped in early June finally arrived at the end of August - the customer was very understanding, noting that a domestic package shipped back in March had only recently arrived. before you order, please check https://about.usps.com/newsroom/service-alerts/international/welcome.htm for information on shipping delays to your country
Seemingly at random, international packages can be held up in customs, typically for up to two weeks at a time. Occasionally the packages are actually opened for inspection, but most often, they are simply set aside to age for a couple of weeks, and then continue on their way. This can happen to even International Priority/Priority Express. UPS is said to have a better time of getting through customs, which is one of the reasons we are hoping to offer it in the near future.