I understand your frustration with USPS but here's something to consider when shipping outside of the US with UPS.
UPS charges a brokerage fee, at least in Canada, for delivering a package. The fee is approximately $100. Someone could order $50 of gaskets from you, then will get hit with a $100 brokerage fee. You will definitely get customers complaining over that.
Please offer USPS as a choice to those customers outside of the US. If they choose UPS, it's on them that they should have known about the brokerage fee.
Mike.
I have only been offering UPS worldwide Expedited. I negotiated some new rates cause since I stopped shipping USPS I'm spending $5000/week with UPS now. $10 brokerage fee max (if any), FAST (less than a week), about the same price as our Priority Mail (starts at about $35) and best of all I don't get customers calling every day asking where their package is for 3 weeks. UPS is so fast that customers have actually been contacting me to tell me how FAST their package arrived. I will never ship something international via postal again. Every global postal system is the same or worse (if thats possible) than ours. SLOWWWWWWWWWW and theft. I have basically limited any international to Canada, Northern Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. 5% of my business is international so I'll let my distributors handle those sales. Only countries its EASY to ship to is Australia and New Zealand. They have a de minimis like the US where we dont pay any taxes on imports upto $800 in value. Canada and many European countries is $20. Ouch.
