Comment · Fri, April 24, 2020
Shipment Woes and a Note regarding International Shipping
Original post in this thread
AmensiacKidA · 2 points
EDIT: This is only regarding DHLEcommerce. DHL express and other shipping options are still operating as usual. I'm adding this in to avoid any confusion for anyone coming across this. Please refer to /u/MisterYouAreSoDumb comments in this post for detailed info regarding this.
This has been quite frustrating. I placed an order on the 25th of March to India. It was my assumption that the USA was still shipping to India and I think I even saw a comment here that said ND is still currently shipping everywhere (during the pandemic).
But my tracking never got updated- and while I assumed there were delays because of the current global situation (and I'm not the least bit bothered by shipment delays due to this!), My tracking kept showing me week after week that it was still "En route to DHL E-commerce" (till a day or two ago). I have been in touch with the support team (starting from April 7) requesting an update. They told me they contacted DHL with no response from them. And yesterday (after almost a month from placing the order), I come to know from them that DHL has sent back my order citing "routing error". Upon requesting further details, they said that DHL is not shipping…
What they were answering
Direct reply to the original post — see the thread post above.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
Yeah, we kind of got screwed by COVID-19 and DHL Ecommerce. They suspended shipping to a bunch of countries, which India was one of. However, they told us that anything that was already on the way would still be delivered. That was not accurate. Basically any packages that were not already through customs before they suspended shipping to those countries are being returned to us. That was not what we were told by DHL, and they just drop new countries to their suspension list every couple days. It think we are over 40 now. So it is hard to stay on top of. We can still ship to these countries. However, we have to use different carriers to do it.
Sorry for the hassle! We are at the mercy of the mail carriers right now. They are all just unilaterally changing their policies and rules, and telling everyone to just accept it. Both FedEx and UPS suspended all their delivery guarantees, too. So if you pay for overnight shipping, and it takes 3 days, they will not refund it anymore... I get that COVID-19 is causing a lot of issues, but if you can't guarantee an offering you have, then you should stop offering it! So we have removed the overnight shipping options from the site now. I can't offer customers a service that the carriers will not guarantee.
Anyway, what's your order number? I'll get you refunded for the whole thing. My team generally does not refund the shipping if it was an error by the customer, but that's not the case here. So I'll get you taken care of and try to get DHL to honor their agreement with us. We can also try and reship using a different service. This is only affecting our standard mail option, which is DHL Ecommerce. That's because DHL hands off to your local postal system for final delivery. Normal DHL is still delivering, though.