Australia Post, the US Government, and to a lesser extent eBay, have essentially said “No More Small Packet Letter Post”.
The impact on RecoverToy is to remove our ability to cheaply send our low value toy car parts for a realistic cost outside of Australia.
In a nutshell, the USA Government have created a law that requires all inbound mail to the USA to have specific information about the contents of the packet supplied to the USA Customs and Border Protection Service prior to the packet leaving the originating country, in our case, Australia. Read more at https://www.uspsoig.gov/document/implementing-advanced-electronic-data-challenges-and-opportunities
Australia Post, seizing the opportunity to stop small business in Australia from using letter post to send merchandise and make us use Parcel Post, have only developed a process for recording the required data for Parcels and not for small packet Letter post. Read more at https://auspost.com.au/sending/send-overseas/customs-forms-regulations/electronic-advance-data-ead
The end result of this is that all articles of merchandise from Australia to the USA and potentially other countries must be sent as parcels with a minimum cost of AU$25.00 regardless of the weight or value of the items. So a standard RecoverToy packet weighing 30grams (approx 1.5oz) and valued at AU$4.00 will cost AU$25.00 to post. Let alone the additional time processing the information with the woefully useless process Australia Post have implemented for the data capture.
Obviously, that is not a viable process. As a result we have had to:
- suspend our RecoverToy_USA and RecoverToy_UK ebay stores from trading
- remove all cheap international post options from our website store and eBay Australia store
- modify the International Postage rates for our RecoverToy eBay Australia store.
The situation for any of our International customers is:
- If you want to purchase only 1 or 2 items the postage cost will be excessive per item
- If you want to purchase many items, then the postage cost per item will not be too bad and the more you purchase the cheaper the per item cost will be
- All current orders will be reviewed and where practical the items will be delivered as a parcel, where this is not possible a refund will be issued.
- Approximately 150 small packets posted in the period March 2021 to May 2021 have been returned to us today. Each of these will need to be back-traced to the order point and refunded.
At this time, we have no apparent options, although we are pursuing communication with Australia Post.
We will update this information as soon as anything changes.
