FedEx shipping

[cteno4]

Just had a package from hobby link japan come fedex. At 1.6kg it was at the upper range for Sal and I think about the same price and maybe the box has to be jsut over Sal size (they would not offer Sal on it so assume this may be the case). But at 1720 yen to ship it came in 3 days! Faster than EMS has been here in the last couple of years (closer to 4-5 days usually). Went in Monday morning and here thrus morning! All tracked and insured! EMS I think was over 2900 yen for the same package.

 

Too bad other shops don't use fedex! I wonder if it's a volume deal as I know my wife's large company got fedex prices a third the cost of my small business account did! But with EMS prices going up,maybe it will become a competitive advantage to EMS. In this case it was the cheapest way I could ship the pile of items as with hlj's private warehouse you can configure the pile of stuff you have bought over time into what ever shipping batches you like (very neat feature!)

 

Cheers

 

Jeff

Edited May 26, 2016 by cteno4

[nah00]

Fedex in my experience is weird. Sometimes the shipping price has been MUCH less than EMS through HLJ whereas other times it's about the same/slightly more. I think since they do so much business in the US and do some wholesale as well Fedex makes a lot of sense for them. 

 

What DOESN'T make sense is getting a package from Hobbysearch and HLJ on the same day. Both were roughly the same size, pretty much the same weight...but Hobbysearch was 4000 yen and HLJ was...2500. I'm about to tell Hobbysearch to hold off on the piles of paper they send me with my orders...

[1954G]

I am glad FedEx worked out for you. A couple of years ago, I heard that FedEx charged brokerage fees to the recipient for the service of clearing an item through customs. Hopefully they have stopped doing this for deliveries to the US.

[cteno4]

I know in countries where there are customs duties fedex will act as a broker. I have had this on larger equipment orders from the us and Canada a few years back. At the time fedex was the cheapest and fastest way to get the items thru customs and any duties dealt with or let it take forever clearing customs. This was for like >$1k purchase for business not hobby stuff. Always flumixed me as it was Canada and where was nafta?!

 

I've done fedex from Japan like 6 or 7 times in the past from Japan and no service charges ever and I think all cases were like my one above with them being cheaper than EMS and pretty quick, but this is the fastest I've gotten any package in the last couple of years from Japan. The old Amazon.jp book orders would usually show up in 2-3 days which was surprising, but that was when they had that flat 1500 yen for the first book and 300 yen for each additional, now it's a lot more! Luckily it's hard to trip duities from us to Japan on toys!

 

Cheers

 

Jeff

[nah00]

Fedex always clears through customs for me faster (usually ends up coming through Alaska) and I've never had any fees. It does seem to be about a day or two faster than EMS and since they run 24-7 I've never seen a package 'stuck' anywhere (*cough*Jamaica, NY*cough*) and have even got deliveries on Sunday. With the EMS hike I'll probably jut start going with Fedex< I can always just leave a note for the drive and they'll leave the box whereas I've have the postman decide even though I filled the form out they weren't going to leave the package.