Feeling Blue about My Loot!
Wed 2010/09/22 08:42 JST
Geez, I hate it when my packages hang in limbo for too long and this package has just returned from Limbo. Having shipped on 8/25 the package arrived today 9/21. It sat at customs since the 31st for no reason what so ever since the box was not resealed. Box arrived undamaged from AmiAmi and was packed fine so everything is like new. Anyway these beauties are ready to be part of my collection!
Title is due to all boxes containing blue, creative eh?
I recently had a delivery from amiami for a fairly low value item (approx 33US dollars excluding shipping) which got stopped by UK customs.I had to pay a charge of about 21 US dollars.That gave me the Blues :(
What exactly was that charge for? The honor of receiving your package? Sounds like it was just held hostage. It's awful what customs do to you guys.
12-13 US dollars would be the admin/handling charge by the Post office( for SAL parcels) and the rest 6-7 US Dollars is taxes.
Using EMS the admin/handling charge would have been more then double this and I am pretty sure EMS got higher rate of being stopped by customs.
Unnecessary fees make negativezero a sad sad boy. not cool at all, i would be turned off of buying figures. Do they also make you go and pick it up , or is the money collected upon delivery?
I generally go and pick up the item from the post office the same day. However it is possible to make payment on-line and get the item delivered another day.
I have cancelled a couple of smaller pre-orders cause of charges.
Are there any Otaku retail stores in Puchi Ville (near you)? Do you ever have anime conventions in your area? is your area plagued with bootlegs?
I am in the uk.I only ever seen 2 stores in London selling figures.Figures were expensive with very limited choice.
I generally buy on-line from Japan using reputable suppliers such as Amiami,Hobbysearch,HLJ & Otocute.Occasionaly I resort to ebay
Hey Negative nice loot! that Menace is still tempting me! my BRS figma went through something weird too but arrived recently, that's why I always use EMS I'd freak without a tracking number at least you can see it's at customs.
Since this was from Ami Ami it was SAL registered which does provide a tracking number. Being registered seems to help it move faster even with SAL. It took 6 days to get to the USA but 3 weeks to get from an airport 30 minutes from my house. Ridiculous. My collection would be about half the size if I used EMS for everything,
I don't really know much about shipping methods, most of the time I use HLJ and HS, and didn't really know about that SAL registerd being trackable, so you can choose that option at AmiAmi? ought to give it a try there, but if it was regular SAL without tracking I rather to pay the extra bucks, it's maybe safe in the US but around here it'd probably go missing.
Ah, I understand now. best to go EMS in your case. Don't need any of our beauties going missing. Ami Ami is the only one (I know of) who offers SAL registered.