Australia - Incoming Mail Delays

Hi All Is anybody else in the Land of OZ experiencing incoming mail delays from overseas? More specifically, USPS Priority, EMS, DHL Express and Royal Mail? I've got some orders on the water from last month that tracking shows have left the country of origin on 28th October, and no arrival in Oz yet.


Comments


[7 Points] None:

Please don't take this as harshly as it is going to sound, but we get posts like this quite a lot.

People notice a slowing of their own mail and tend to wonder if an entire country's mail system is somehow affected, or in your case, if the entire planet is experiencing a massive delay.

The fact of the matter is that there are hundreds of reasons that mail slows down. Even with this global crackdown on DNMs, ultimately they are a microscopic potion of the mail that is sent around the world, and a single employee of a sort office being an hour late to work is enough to cause a bottleneck that lasts a day or so.

OZ has a very rigorous customs department and even if mail has arrived, it has not necessarily been scanned into the customs office. Nobody is going to be able to give you an accurate answer for why your own mail isn't arriving, especially since it seems to be coming from several countries. They've always been astonishingly thorough so I don't think the recent events will have caused them to make many, if any changes. They've always been far ahead of the pack.

I do realize just how much it sucks to be waiting on something to show up. Years ago I lived in the USA and used to order Nurofen Plus on clearnet from NZ about twice a month. Typically they would put it in transit the next day and I would check the tracking number at least once or twice a day, just so I could see progress. I knew it so well that it took three days to hit customs, 24 hours there, two more to my sort facility, one to my local office, and generally the next day out for delivery. If it changed by even a single day I would start coming up with all sorts of ridiculous notions about what might have happened. But ultimately, it always showed up. It sucks to wait, but there's really nothing else to do about it.


[4 Points] None:

i'm a us vendor who ships only to oz. its 100% of my business, so i feel as if its my duty to respond. i'm quite sure i have more packs in route to oz than anyone outside of ebay :)

its very difficult to ever find a correlation between mail times and logic when it comes to USPS/Australia. I could write for days about this.. but first of all, priority is now no better than FCM now that FCM has eldecon available. literally the tracking is exactly the same, and there is no "priority" over anything really. so save that 25 bucks.

second, if you are in WA, then your shit is going to be all over the place on delivery times. you will still get it, but you will ALWAYS be later than every single other place on the continent by at least 4 days.

and lastly, i have literally dropped two pieces in the same mailbox bearing the same labeling going to the exact same address. just to see what would occur. the result was the first pack being delivered fcm (eldecon) in 11 days. the second pack made a very strong comeback and showed up after being completely written off after 23 days.

there is no logic to explain it. and if i can't tell you... then nobody can tell you :) but it'll get there. stay away from express mail, and it will get there almost always. oz customs is good, but hardly any country has time to search plain old fcm. and for DNM mailing, hardly any customers have the patience to wait for it... so you the odds are stacked heavily in your favor.

i would say in a given mailing batch, around 90% of my customers would take express mail, and courier over that, if i would let them. but i'll force them to be patient, and then they are always much happier when they actually get their shit.


[3 Points] durgsrbad:

Started with tossing our hat into the right with the War on Terror. Add the G20 into the mix, and it's a tough slog being a parcel these days.


[2 Points] Auspostsux:

Thanks for the reassurance Lobali. Given the current DNM climate, one can't help but wonder. In the end, it must be Postal Anxiety on my part. I will consult with my GP tomorrow for a prescription of some sort to calm the fuck down.


[1 Points] drugpigthrowaway:

15 days is not unusual, time to calm your tits dude. I order a lot of stuff off ebay that gets delivered from China, I start to get worried when time approaches 30 days. No, that's not US or UK, but still a long way......


[1 Points] throwahooawayyfoe:

Hey... Not in AUS, but I just had a pack from china show up to the US today that I ordered probably a month ago. The last time the tracking was updated was in shanghai on the 29th and it didn't receive any more updates after that. It just kinda surprised me when it arrived today because I looked at the tracking yesterday and it said it was still in china. All of this is to say, don't worry so much. Customs can be slower than molasses in january (or in your case... june, i guess) sometimes. Just about the time you start thinking you've gotten scammed is about the time when it'll show up.


[1 Points] mad87645:

15 days for international is pretty normal, non DNM related things I buy off amazon, american ebay and such normally take a month to land on my doorstep.