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I just had UPS try to collect a ridiculous "import fee" that I never faced before when I bought stuff from the GW website. It was basically 43% of the total purchase price. Stuff used to come to me with Royal Mail and it was always completely free. It really sours me that I will now have to argue with someone to have this fee dropped. Obviously I'm not paying that and if worst comes to worst the package is undeliverable which means I will get most of my money back in a month. Anyway, wanted to give a heads up to anyone who uses the webstore.

They used to use UPS from the US also (they use whichever carrier is best for them to your region., though. So Royal mail may handle the UK side of things, but if they go international, it's left to whomever has the parcel contract in your area, too.

[Before they started that global embargo thing, limiting you to purchases from your own region, only]

It came in handy for me at the time, since I worked for UPS and UPS did "depot to depot" shipping for free (employee perk) so I got free shipping for a couple of years.

If you're having issues with UPS, let GW know.

The fee comes from UPS being licensed and certified to be it's own customs import broker, where normal mail goes through standard postal customs private companies like UPS are able to use their own internal customs agents which costs them money so they pass that onto the customer with a import fee which from my understanding is about $50 per package when the value of the package might be as low as $10. They don't inform the sender of this situation and leave it as a rather rude surprise to the buyer, it's basically shipping extortion pay our import fee or we keep the package. Shipping UPS within the country is great but using it for international delivery is a nightmare.

I assume it's the fact that you're from China vs GER/US/FRANCE and so on. They might have something odd in place from the UK to China mail.

I looked into it to see if there is any sort of tax. China has a 12% VAT on books. Again, not a new tax and not nearly what UPS is trying to charge. Also looked into the GW store and they do have free no questions asked returns, so it's in their interest to resolve this for me or else they eat the shipping costs and get nothing. I sent them an email yesterday so I assume that they will answer me at some point today. Next time I'm just buying my stuff on Taobao or I'll go into the store in Shanghai. The whole reason I even used the web store was for the convenience.

I hate ups for how slow and all around irritating they are where I live, I vastly prefer the good ol' USPS.

Afaik this is not the case for UK deliveries, got a deliver recently in perfect timing via RM.

 Selym wrote:
Afaik this is not the case for UK deliveries, got a deliver recently in perfect timing via RM.

Very much prefer RM here, irritates me no end when companies "upgrade for free to next day!", as that invariably means no one is in when it arrives and the courier depot is miles away and never open sensible hours as opposed to the RM depot..

And don't get me started on Amazon's inability to stick to a delivery estimate..

GW, never had a problem with

 Selym wrote:
Afaik this is not the case for UK deliveries, got a deliver recently in perfect timing via RM.

Still using RM for me in the UK, unless I order spray paint, which does come by UPS now - it used to be Parcel Force.

Parcel Force won't carry non-toiletries aerosols, that's why.

And yes, courier delivery is a pain in the fundament - none of them have really grasped that you can't do household deliveries the same way as they do business deliveries.

Its not GW. Its China. The import tax started around Christmas last year. Toys, clothing, make up, designer stuff, everything.

I had bought GW stuff after Christmas and never had an issue. I did get more details. Basically GW automatically "upgrades" to UPS if it weighs over 2 kg. They were sympathetic but not really useful, which means that the package gets returned to them.

I just had a replacement part sent from GW (plastic canopy for my fire prisms) and geedubs sent it in an a4 padded envelope, first class royal air mail. For 1 canopy.