From September to mid of October of 2014, we’ve never been on this side of the fence and want to share the terrifying experience.

We have access to both China and Hong Kong versions of all major carriers. Prices are drastically different depending on destination, and there’s no consistency. Shenzhen and Hong Kong are essentially the same city, so the logistics companies truck stuff over the border into Hong Kong. One thing is for sure, receiving a package handled by a logistics company confuses the hell out of some customers. It’s drastically different than your friendly Boys in Brown kicking a package onto a big brown truck:

Shipment notification goes out

• Logistics company agent come to pick up shipment to their warehouse
• The agent drives the packages to the shipper, possibly through Hong Kong Customs and into Hong Kong
• The package is transferred to DHL, UPS, or Fedex
• Logistics company give a tracking number
• At this point, several days later( before it’s 1 day ), you actually start to see tracking info
• 1 day later your package is delivered

Logistics company sells this service as 3-5 business day delivery. That is transit time only. It doesn’t include drop-off day, pickup day, or weekends. Sometimes delivery is amazingly fast, sometimes the window is stretched to the limit. It is, however, cheap.

The 3-4 day window without a tracking update terrifies some people. Here’s slight mocking of some of the reoccurring themes:

It’s been 2 days with no updates. The order is lost. I order 100s of things from China and I always get my tracking number right away and immediate updates. Call your shipper now!
—-No, you chose dirt cheap DHL via Hong Kong and some guy is schlepping it there on a truck.
There’s no tracking update because you didn’t really ship my order. You just pretended because your board house messed up and you redid the order.
—-No, we’d just tell you and say sorry.

And on and on. There are days when we swear we’ll stop doing express shipping because it’s more work for us, and seems to make some customers manic too. We’ve even had a customer try to contact our logistics companies on their own.Quality fade sets in. This is when a service starts out very strong, but creeps towards unusable. Remote area delivery is drag too. Yes, the address may be in the middle of a huge city and nobody else hesitates to ship there, but the Chinese/Hong Kong DHL, Fedex, or UPS database says otherwise. We don’t control it, Logistics company don’t control it, there’s absolutely nothing we can do.

China has a ton of holidays. Long ones. Especially notorious is the National Day holiday. It’s ten days over the first week of October. That is exactly when the rest of the world is trying to get the latest hotness on store shelves for holiday shopping. Planes are full, trucks are full, customs has a huge backlog, then everyone just takes off for a week. Anyone doing business in China plans for this. We see more regular visitors, here to personally see things ship, than at any other time of year. We received 10+ emails asking why orders were not being processed. Probably the best thing to do is to not take orders at all during this period.

Then came the Chinese Shipping Apocalypse. The new President of China is moving swiftly to crack down on government corruption. Thousands of local, provincial, and national Chinese Governors have been fired or arrested for all manners of crime and corruption. In the midst of the holiday shipping glut, at the busiest land crossing between China and Hong Kong, officials found a van full of crystal methamphetamine and 2 tons of fake currency. 500 customs officials were fired for corruption, and now every package leaving China is inspected individually. Shipping times exploded from 3-5 days to 7-9 days or more. We had 10 orders, all on the same truck to Hong Kong, get stuck in customs for more than 10 days. Lots and lots of anxious and angry customers, absolutely nothing we could do. Several logistics companies and our DHL contacts all confirmed that this is a nation wide problem, not just something effecting us.

Because of custom inspecition , all DHL, UPS, Fedex etc cargoes shipped out through Hongkong will be delayed for 2-3days. ( Total 5-6days)
All cargoes shipped out through Shenzhen agent directly will be delayed 2days. ( Total 4-5days)

By dealing directly with DHL, rather than a logistics company, next-day and even same-day shipping are available. A DHL rep claims that we also get priority clearance through customs. It’s not nearly as cheap, We hope to dump former logistic companies for express services and jump to faster, more reliable services straight from DHL.

Anyway, things seem to be calming down a bit now with the holiday over, direct DHL shipping etc and we will give you best shipment suggestion according to your schedule and address.