general thoughts

clearance delays and what you might learn from it

So we shipped quite some explorer sets these last 7 days. Actually,we shipped much more than I would have anticipated. Today´s picture shows you a little detail cut-out of the Fedex track list for these explorer sets shipments.

Most of them shipped from here to there smoothly, picked up in time, moved from Zurich to Paris and from there on to the US or other places. Fedex comes with a great tracking tool  and it is such a treat working with them, compared to the average postal system that we have in place here in Switzerland and other places in the world.

OK, so far so good. Here comes the bad news, though. As we shipped a lot of sets, from here to places north, east like Saudi Arabia, South like Spain and West like the US (tons of it) I can start comparing. The sad preliminary statistic: A lot of countries in the EU give troubles with customs clearing: Czech Republic, Poland, Portugal, Spain.

The  US is paradise. Many EU countries not really.

And finally, we learned by experience yesterday and by talking to Fedex, that legally….well, is is illegal for Spanish private persons to import perfume from a non EU country. Yes, we get a shipment back for this reason, paying shipment twice, reimbursing the client as soon as we got it back, and yes: For the time being, Spain is a country that we cannot serve. Wow…. When I have time, I needd to adjust the shipment settings. For the time being, I just removed Spain from the list of countries that we serve.

 

Ahh, and yes: If you do not like this. Talk to your Spanish customs officer please and do not yell at us. Thanks.