They are working on it. Neal thinks they should have it figured out by the time the reflectors show up this week and hopes they will be able to have them shipped either this week or early next week.
Lumintop sells their lights by giant AliExpress. These guys are bigger than Amazon. They maybe have subsidized deals with China post. You can’t compare Lumintop with AliExpress. I think I would be better to let AE deal with shipping to Europe, but this is a GB deal with Lumintop, so maybe this is not possible or something.
That has got to be either a permit issue regarding LT shipping Li-Ions or a labelling issue regarding shipping Li-Ions, as if it were a value issue the package would arrive at UK customs & the problem would be with UK customs.
From what TA has said it sounds like LT still have a problem with permits ?
Any Chinese merchant gets a subsidized deal every time they ship something to the West, at least with the typical package size. It’s the Western taxpayers and/or postal customers who pay.
Here’s the punchline:
This is why sending a letter containing one A4 sheet to my neighbor just across the street is more expensive than buying a pair of nail clippers from China shipping included.
The GT - and probably half a GT - must be way above this certain size and weight, thus they will have to pay a proper market price. It’s really steep compared to the regular mail shipping cost they typically pay. That’s why it’s expensive.
Even considering the above, I’m really surprised that courier is cheaper.
Thanks to everyone for not giving me 5 pages of posts to read through, you have no idea how refreshing this has been the last few days with only a few posts to catch up on.
I got a reply a little bit ago with some more information.
Lumintop will be closing down for the China New Years next week, so the 3rd batch of PM’s will for sure not go out before they are back up and running.
They said that they should have most of the registered mail issues sorted out now and if the reflectors show up soon and are good quality they hope to get most if not all of the existing orders shipped before the New years celebration. This largely depends on how many reflectors there are and if they are good enough quality.
An update on the UK orders, they have had 5 GT’s returned from the UK 3 times. They are not sure why they were returned but so far it is only effecting these 5 orders that they know of. They are trying to figure out an alternative option for these orders.
They also had a GT from Romania returned that is somehow costing them $300 to sort out.
Otherwise they say everything is going as good as could be expected.
It seems that the UK shipment issues are due to the value not being accurate on customs form. They are apparently hyper strict about this now and refusing packages that they think are under-valued.
Say Dale, DB Custom, didn’t you do a a thread sometime ago on polishing reflectors?
I recall that it said which grade wet sand papers to start with on through completion.
It might have been someone else, it’s been quit awhile.
I’ve been looking through my notebooks and can’t find the polishing instructions, sure was a good write up and I’ve used that process many times, sure would like to find that again. I think it had two methods actually, one was removing a coating to bare aluminum and the other was polishing that coating, can’t recall what it is called either. dang.
Are the 5 UK destined packages that are being returned to LT by Hong Kong customs all with batteries ?
iirc 2 UK lights without batteries were delivered fine, ChrisC & someone else.
Could it be that the extra weight of the packages containing batteries is what is raising HK customs suspicions ?
Still seems a bit odd to me that a valuation problem is with the sending countries customs as generally it would be the receiving countries customs that would have an issue with a packages value if they believe it to be incorrect.
Anyway I hope that LT do manage to sort the issue out & get some lights shipped before Chinese New Year
Kudos to yourself, Neal & LT for trying to resolve these issues & for keeping us updated :+1:
Did you maybe send to Neal list of people which wanted to change from registerd to DHL?
If not, can you send it and ask him if this is still possible.
Can you maybe ask Neal to give top priority to first 555 orders. So that GT are first sent to all from 555 list.
With registered or DHL, important is that after 2 months FL are on the way to customers.
If this can be done before China holidays, it will be very good.
I got bitten by VAT today, for an item marked as over € 22.—
Especially the administration cost for the “work” of taxing me were high: €13.—
Tax itself was just €5.14
So, i just want to say (as others have before me) i hope Lumitop will keep it under $25 per package.
I would rather pay Lumintop some extra for shipping fees (which apparently turn out to be higher than expected) than for customs and their “work”.