OK we're changing everything up.

I know this is a really long post, but read this, understand it, we're serious here, and we're gonna be a little more blunt than normal because we want this to be very well understood. This isn't the post you were hoping for, or that we were hoping for, but it does have a silver lining.

We have killed the international customs/duties/taxes/fees calculator.

With the model where we were charging them up front we were unable to use USPS, and the company that calculated all of these charged some fees and took a cut as well.
We also have come to a conclusion that some of the fees must have been marked up. Disbursement fees had been $30 sometimes when they should have been like $15.

The long story short here is that if you order now, you WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR CUSTOMS/DUTIES/TAXES/FEES on delivery. That's all there is to it. They will definitely happen.

Why don't you get charged these when you order from other companies?

They use a logistics company that ships everything to their own warehouse in Canada/UK/Australia/elsewhere, and then to you, meaning you yourself technically never imported it. It was "transferred" to your country, and then delivered to you from within your country.

We'd love to get there eventually but right now, due to our size and resources, there is absolutely 100% nothing we can do about this part. Anything ordered from us will be considered imported by you and these charges will happen.

Now for the positive

The total between shipping paid up front and the charges on delivery should never come out to be AS MUCH as you would have been charged with the system we have been using up until now. This is especially true if you use USPS (they have some of the lowest carrier fees for international, although this won't help with your country's fees, taxes, and charges.)

What we CAN work on currently and try to improve is our shipping rates themselves, rather than the previously mentioned charges. We had a meeting with Fedex today so they're trying to see if they can help, and we're waiting on a shipping company that does consolidated shipping to see how that would look.

"What does this mean for me?"

This means that you can now order from us for less overall, but you can expect charges on delivery. None of this money is going to us, and we will not be responsible for any of it. You could say that you are taking a gamble, but what we suggest to make it less of a gamble is to use customs/duties/taxes/fee calculators available online to estimate how much these charges would be prior to ordering so that you are prepared.

If we have customers contact us later because they got charges, thinking that there wouldn't be any charges because they don't get charges with another company, we will have to apologize for the misunderstanding but insist that the customer is responsible for these charges, and that we aren't that other company, and don't have the means that they have.

Believe us

We understand this is not the ideal scenario, and we understand this is not what many of you have been waiting for, but these are the steps that we are able to take for now. We're just a few people, doing what we can.

We love all of our international customers who want to order diamond paintings from us and support us, and we appreciate all of you, but this is a very hands-tied scenario at the moment regarding these charges. We thought that charging all of these costs up front would at least avoid negative surprises on delivery, but doing that just added extra cost to all of you, and at the end of the day, we don't think anyone wants to be paying more just to be able to pay it up front.

This is only for orders placed as of this posting.
This does not affect orders already paid, if you already paid these charges up front, we will still be shipping your order in a way where there are no charges on arrival.

We appreciate your patience in us bumbling our way through all of this and getting all of this figured out, let us know if there's anything we didn't address here that you would like to know. If we have further updates, we'll definitely post letting everyone know, if we don't post any further updates, we don't have any yet, but that doesn't mean we're done trying to do whatever we can to improve the situation.

January 05, 2022 — Adrian Scarborough
Tags: News

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