I’ll try and sum up the registered mail issue with various posts from Texas_Ace from Jan 26th and 27th. This from Texas_Ace so it’s all official information.
Texas_Ace:
It seems Lumintop are having trouble figuring out how to ship the registered mail shipments in a way that will be delivered with minimal customs issues and high reliability combined with reasonable costs. Seems that some areas could cost $80 to ship the light so they are trying to figure out more reasonable options as that kind of cost obviously causes them to loose a fair amount of money on the light.
I think they have a few options they are testing / working out now. Once they settle on one the lights should ship fairly quickly. I will let you know more when I know more.
Neal said he will have them finish shipping to the first 555 before the others once they sort out the registered mail. He hopes they will have that figured out next week, not getting into the details but know that both Neal and lumintop have been hard at work trying to get this sorted out for some time.
Neal also told me that the UK orders are shipping today (which could be Monday before they are actually on their way based on past experience), he thinks they have the customs issues sorted out. (I think this is the DHL orders. JW)
You are comparing lights that weight 250g with a light that weights 2500g. The weight and size is the problem with shipping the GT.
The other issue is customs, they are trying to find the highest likely hood that it will not be charged customs fees all while keeping the price low enough to not be loosing even more money.
This is no small task.
Also the registered mail was something we demanded, not something they wanted to do. They only wanted to offer DHL but many on here wanted an option with a better chance of not having customs fees, so they decided to offer registered mail as an option.
In retrospect I can pretty much say that they regret that decision.
It is not clear at this time how they will be shipped. I get the feeling it will vary depending on the destination. Most of the basic mail shipping methods are limited to 2kg but they can also cost $30-40 per box to ship.
All I know at this time is they are working on the best options.
For the list of those willing to switch to DHL, know that there is NO GUARANTEE that this can or will happen. It is so late in the game I am not sure what is still possible to change at this point. I will pass on the list to Neal and see what happens.
Do no be surprised if it is too late to make a change like this.
The cost for shipping varies by destination, I think most destinations average out to around ~$40 from what I could gather, which is about what they budgeted for the shipping costs for the GT based on other information I have put together.
The issue is that some of the smaller countries are costing upwards of $85 and needless to say that is not exactly great for lumintop.
You can’t really blame them too much for missing this either, they have never shipping orders this big before so it is all new for them. Plus looking up the prices for every possible country is not practical from someone that has personally shipped well over 25k orders over the years.
(From Jan 29th)
Waiting to hear back from Neal on if it is too late for people to change the shipping method. Now that the weekend is over hopefully we will hear from him soon.