Posting your work

[SICraftDesigns]

Hi all, not strictly speaking a jewellery related topic but once you've made your work you've got to get it to your customer and this is something that's been giving me more bother than it should do lately!

For those of you who sell internationally, who do you use to ship overseas?

I had been using parcelhero (an agent giving you the choice of all the big names). They were relatively cheap and seemed to be pretty good until I had a string of items lost in transit. Their customer service is poor (read absolutely shocking - genuinely beyond belief!) and was enough to make me look elsewhere.

I've since tried Parcel Monkey & iPost Parcels but a similar theme here (the latter doesn't even appear to have any means of contacting them if you experience an issue).

Trouble is now that a lot of these agents don't have the best customer service and when things go wrong and you've got a customer worrying that their wedding ring isn't going to arrive with them in time the last thing you need is more trouble from the shipping agent.

I did have a (admittedly very quick) look at getting an account with FedEx however looking at their rates section it would appear that unless I'm shipping large volumes then their prices are very high (£80 for a package to the US).

So, who do you guys use and why?

[enigma]

I am in Portugal so not totally applicable but one thing I did find when I had problems with items going missing was that it seemed to be with packaging getting torn.
Since changing to very strong padded plastic packaging I haven't had anything go missing ( touches wood!).

[SICraftDesigns]

Thank you for your suggestion. We did have some issue with that so have moved to Jiffy Green bags (the ones with the annoying fluff inside that goes everywhere when you try and open them!) and to be fair we've not lost anything since. The problem we have now seems to be missed collections left right and center!

[enigma]

Are they environmentally friendly then? I hate using plastic, just can't afford to lose things in the mail.

[SICraftDesigns]

Yea - the padding is made from recycled paper and the outer is made from Kraft paper so should be fully recyclable. They are a lot more robust than standard padded envelopes. I guess they could still tear however they have an inner liner too so the chances of tearing through both sufficiently for your items to fall out of is slim.

As a bonus I found them relatively cheap on Ebay. Here's the first hit from google: https://www.rajapack.co.uk/envelopes-mailing-bags/jiffy-bags-bubble-envelopes/padded-self-seal-gold-jiffy-bags_PDT09582.html

[enigma]

Great thank you )

[Dennis]

All you can do is read the reviews an choose the least bad. Usually they say that when goods are lost service goes pear shaped. Dennis.

[pearlescence]

I usually use Royal Mail for international
Generally postal services seem to have improved around the world in the last year.

[SICraftDesigns]

We use Royal Mail for the majority of our orders and have had vary few if any issues with them. Only issue is that they take their time shipping to the US (5-7 days but that's not guaranteed - I've frequently had packages take twice that!). They do offer Parcel Force global express but that's around £60-80 per item. I did look briefly into franking machines however I'm not convinced that they're worthwhile as from looking at other advice online they appear to have surprisingly high running costs which negate any savings.

I think we're going to stick with Parcel Monkey for now as they seem to be the best we've used. Certainly won't be using either ParcelHero or iPost Parcels (UKMail) again!