<div></div><div>I bow to your vast experience....actually no I don't. It is one of my pet hates when people write exactly what you just wrote. Your experience shipping and receiving items, is limited. I really cannot be bothered explaining things to people anymore so I will write some quick bullet points for you:</div><div></div><div><ul>[*]Different shipping companies have different shipping targets[*]Different shipping companies have different services[*]Different countries can have numerous shipping companies ranging from national/state to private companies[*]Different companies use different shipping methods as the default[*]When you receive your package can be dependant on something as simple as when it was posted on that particular day to what day it was posted[*]Then you have potential national delays from weather, accidents, depot delays, strikes, working hours. The UK and parts of Europe have had issues with all of those recently[/list]<div>For the last 6 months we've experienced delays internationally, as have other businesses I have talked too. While the average was two to three weeks a significant percentage of packages were delayed between 5-6 weeks. One package to the USA took 9 weeks to arrive. I would expect we had around 30% of all international shipments delayed.</div></div><div></div><div>The dollar value of lost items, or items that were delayed for so long that I couldn't expect the customer to wait longer was around $1500. That is not including money lost through Paypal claims, time, materials etc. That value was from November to January only.</div><div><font size="2">
</font></div><div><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">We have six different international services we use, the slowest supposedly 7-10 days to North America. If you received something extremely quickly it was sent using an expedited service. Most probably International Signed For or Airsure and even with these services we had lost or delayed mail to Germany and especially Russia.</font></div>