There were a few reasons why orders were not arriving from China.
- Fentanyl-- This horrible drug was being smuggled in from China, where it was legal, in low cost, untracked parcels. China has criminalized /regularized production and while there is still smuggling it seems to have dropped off, or moved to the US market.
- UPU - The Universal Postal Union makes it possible for us to mail anywhere in the world and has a system vaguely like our provincial equalization policy (but with 197 nations instead of 10 provinces) whereby prosperous countries subsidize developing nations.
But China, which really was a developing nation in 1999, exploded into the second largest economy in the world by 2010. But Western countries were still subsidizing their international post.
Western postal services retaliated by making those low value untracked parcels cost so little in China a very low priority when they hit the Western postal systems. Delays of months resulted.
3.) Chinese sellers used slow, cheap Surface Mail, which normally takes many weeks or even months to arrive. China however was an early adopter of fast, tracked eDelcon and similar shipping which is very cheap. Many Western postal systems have not yet caught on to this.
4.) Most people are honest, including Chinese sellers. But the small percentage who are not can be a very large number. Those sellers were taking money and shipping nothing. They stayed under the radar either by refunding promptly on complaint or by promising a replacement which never arrived either.
So.
With the exception of #4, these problems are more under control now.
- It does make sense to shop for the best deal, and not for the lowest price.
- Look to see if the delivery date is within 30 days.
- File Disputes (not feedback and not customer service and not complaining to the seller) if your purchase is late.
- Read feedback, particularly negs and neutrals, for patterns of slow delivery, poor communication, and low quality.
