Quote Originally Posted by Nick (Scotweb) View Post
Having said that, if you are party to information about legal and honest procedures which we don't know about, and which don't have other drawbacks (such as high rates of 'loss' or rotten service standards, which ultimately cost the customer too) I'll be surprised, but we'd be delighted to hear about it.
Nick,

I'm happy to to recap, and expand on what I've said already on this.

1. Import costs can often be dominated by the courier's brokerage fees, and not the actual taxes and duties (see the example in the other thread). That is -- the largest part of the costs are often courier specific, and not uncontrollable fix government rates.

2. brokerage fees vary by courier -- national mail being the cheapest by far, but there are significant variances between the couriers.

3. brokerage fees vary by service (from the same courier) -- both UPS and FedEx, for instance, have services that include their brokerage fees, and services that don't. This can generate false economies where the retailer selects a shipping method that is, say, $10 cheaper (from the same courier), only to force the customer to incur $40 extra fees. (This is often a difference between "International Priority" and "International Economy", or "Air" and "Ground".)

4. the likelihood of waiving duties/taxes varies between shipping methods (this really just favours national mail carriers, which you are having a particular problem with apparently).

5. Some couriers will negotiate with package recipients over excessive brokerage fees -- FedEx will, UPS won't, in my experience.

6. Some couriers will negotiate over their fees with senders. I previously ran a mail order business in UK, and negotiated with FedEx a 65% discount on their rates in mind of our volume to North America. If I was doing it again, I'd try to negotiate their brokerage fees also in light of what I have subsequently learned.

7. (This probably doesn't apply, but larger courier customers can arrange the courier to bill the sender for duties, and act almost as a domestic US or Canadian supplier. This does require you to have IT systems to handle that. It can work very well. For instance if I buy from the Apple Store in Canada, the goods are actually sent direct from China, or warehouses in California or Memphis -- FedEx handle the brokerage for Apple in bulk, and it's invisible to me).

The only point that I have tried to convey here is, where you feel "our feedback shows the same aggregate behaviour of packages going through customs", I have observed this to not be the case. Sure, there are some random factors, but many stable repeatable factors, that can lead to significant repeatable economies. The point of my detailed examples is to demonstrate that.

A further trend you are alluding to is that Scotweb are experiencing high number of problems with package loss with Royal Mail/Parcelforce. This is preventing you taking advantage of the benefits that can offer in terms of significant reduced cost to the customer. The key question is, is that a common experience, or unique to Scotweb? All I can offer you there is that I used to send between 8,000 and 20,000 packages per year via Royal Mail/Parcel force from UK to US/Canada, and experienced very little loss. The most common problem, though rare, was random misrouting that occasionally caused packages to arrive unusually late. Very rarely did packages not arrive at all.

But this was a handful of years ago. Maybe the service has vastly deteriorated. Or maybe this is a local problem in your specific sorting office that might be resolvable.

I've not noticed many people reporting problems with Royal Mail/Parcelforce deliveries on this forum. This is one of the values of this forum -- sharing information. The membership here is large, and covers orders from a range of UK suppliers. You could post a request for experiences good/bad for Royal Mail/Parcelforce to help determine if this is a problem only Scotweb are experiencing?

Hope this helps.

Mike