heads up for UK peeps

Is this £29 a new thing the UK is putting in place, like a new de minimus charge?

The big change that happened because of COVID-19 right now is that no freight shipments are allowed on commuter aircraft. That's a BIG change, because most mail actually travels on normal commuter flights in the luggage hold. Right now that is disallowed worldwide. So all mail has to travel on cargo planes. Well USPS no longer has any cargo planes. They piggy back off FedEx planes. So what normally happens with our standard mail, which is DHL Ecommerce, is that DHL takes all the international packages from us every day and drives them to a distribution center in California. They get sorted there for their various countries, and get put onto commuter planes to be handed off to the respective local country's postal systems. So for the UK, they usually get put onto British Airways planes already going to the UK, which then the Royal Mail clears through customs and delivers to the customer. Since freight is currently disallowed from going on commuter flights, this can't happen. So what is happening is that they are sorted in California, then given to USPS international to get to the various countries. Well remember what I said about USPS and planes? They don't have their own planes anymore. So they contract with FedEx planes. This means the packages get taken from us by DHL, driven to California, sorted at the center there, handed off to USPS, then put on FedEx planes to the various countries, then cleared by USPS international, then handed off to the respective countries for delivery. So how they clear customs is acting more like a USPS first class international package would right now. I would not think that would affect how they assess duties, but shit is pretty whack right now. We have to pay extra fees on all inbound and outbound shipments at the moment, due to the extra costs associated with dedicated cargo planes.

Also, we are having a ton of supply chain issues because the carriers are limiting freight from suppliers to 50kg per day. This is also due to the commuter/cargo plane issue. So some of our suppliers can only ship out 50kg of raw materials per day to any customer. When we need 1,000kg of something, that limitation is a big problem. So right now our raw materials are trickling in at a snails pace. India is completely shut down. No freight in or out at the moment. COVID-19 has massively screwed up the worldwide mail system.