Big Delays in Mails from Thailand to the UK

thaijewel · Post by **thaijewel** » 23 Feb 2016, 10:11

I would appreciate any help as I am really frustrated. I am selling in ebay and amazon and this year has been a disaster with many deliveries to the UK. I have been shipping to the UK for 8 years and it has always been one of the fastest countries to ship into...well until this year. In January and February several items were delayed 3-4-5-6 weeks and a couple seem to be lost. I know it is not the Thai post because our shipments elsewhere arrive without any problems. Someone mentioned that many items get stopped at UK customs at the moment and this could be the reason. Something really big changed this year and it is causing us huge problems with our business transactions to the UK and dealing with unhappy customers to the point that we are going to close our ebay and amazon UK and stop shipping anything there until this gets back what it was. For example the following tracking numbers show a black hole as soon as they leave Thailand. I tried Thai post, UK Royal and trackitonline.ru websites and nothing comes up:

RR175232235TH
RR175231685TH
RR126946920TH
RR090015655TH
RR175231734TH

There must be a huge amount of items and people affected by this but it is hard to find updates on what is really going on. Could anyone help with any info, updates and links on who to address and what to do please? Thank you.

Post by **Snaggletooth** » 23 Feb 2016, 10:24

As you say, delays are frequently 3-6 weeks. The problem is UK customs, we don't know what the problem is exactly but it's probably staff cuts or changes to processes. The problem started in about August but has got steadily worse, and items don't seem to be processed in the order they arrive so the length of the delay is random. Items show up on the UK tracking site once customs hand them to Royal Mail.

thaijewel · Post by **thaijewel** » 23 Feb 2016, 11:03

Thanks for the reply but this must be a huge issue and I am surprised that it is actually very hard to find any info about this. This is the first forum that I find this issue being discussed. We have items delivered in 5 days and others no news or delivered in 5 weeks. Makes no sense at all.

Post by **Snaggletooth** » 23 Feb 2016, 11:14

I don't think that anyone wants to admit publicly that this is happening. Customs don't have any kind of customer facing section, they pay Royal Mail to do that. This makes customs a much more important customer for RM than we are, so RM won't want to rock the boat by saying something out of turn.

If items are taking more than 5 weeks from posting to the first delivery attempt then you should be able to claim back the cost of posting from your local postal operator. Doing this will help to show that there is a problem.

thaijewel · Post by **thaijewel** » 23 Feb 2016, 11:29

Snaggletooth wrote:I don't think that anyone wants to admit publicly that this is happening. Customs don't have any kind of customer facing section, they pay Royal Mail to do that. This makes customs a much more important customer for RM than we are, so RM won't want to rock the boat by saying something out of turn.

If items are taking more than 5 weeks from posting to the first delivery attempt then you should be able to claim back the cost of posting from your local postal operator. Doing this will help to show that there is a problem.

Yes I started doing this already. I already filed a claim for 2 of them and the other ones will follow too if no activity soon. If anyone has any more info or other forums this being discussed please let me know. I already suspended my ebay shop before more damage is done. Soon my amazon UK will follow. This is ridiculous.

thaijewel · Post by **thaijewel** » 24 Feb 2016, 02:56

Snaggletooth wrote:I don't think that anyone wants to admit publicly that this is happening. Customs don't have any kind of customer facing section, they pay Royal Mail to do that. This makes customs a much more important customer for RM than we are, so RM won't want to rock the boat by saying something out of turn.

If items are taking more than 5 weeks from posting to the first delivery attempt then you should be able to claim back the cost of posting from your local postal operator. Doing this will help to show that there is a problem.

You seem to know many things about UK Royal Mail and UK customs. I was wondering if you know of any tracking service or any way for me to try to locate those items whose tracking numbers I submitted above. Another poster in the forum wrote that he called RM and the lady managed to track the item using another service. I am relly wondering what is the best way doing this. Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Post by **Snaggletooth** » 24 Feb 2016, 10:19

thaijewel wrote:You seem to know many things about UK Royal Mail and UK customs. I was wondering if you know of any tracking service or any way for me to try to locate those items whose tracking numbers I submitted above. Another poster in the forum wrote that he called RM and the lady managed to track the item using another service. I am relly wondering what is the best way doing this.

No, I know a bit about how the pipeline works from working from working for the PO (not RM) plus information I have picked up from this forum. I didn't reply to the post you refer to as I don't know what the lady at customer services would have been looking at. I do know that the internal version of track & trace sometimes gives more info than the external website one, and that items arriving through Parcelforce (instead of RM) seem to get better tracking, but other than that I don't know.

thaijewel · Post by **thaijewel** » 24 Feb 2016, 11:56

Snaggletooth wrote:
thaijewel wrote:You seem to know many things about UK Royal Mail and UK customs. I was wondering if you know of any tracking service or any way for me to try to locate those items whose tracking numbers I submitted above. Another poster in the forum wrote that he called RM and the lady managed to track the item using another service. I am relly wondering what is the best way doing this.
No, I know a bit about how the pipeline works from working from working for the PO (not RM) plus information I have picked up from this forum. I didn't reply to the post you refer to as I don't know what the lady at customer services would have been looking at. I do know that the internal version of track & trace sometimes gives more info than the external website one, and that items arriving through Parcelforce (instead of RM) seem to get better tracking, but other than that I don't know.

The strange thing is that the Thai website and trackitonline.ru have more info than Royal Mail or Parcelforce. If an item clears UK customs it will show up in Thai post tracking or trackitonline.ru faster than RM or parcelforce. I wonder where they get their info from