Sunday, November 25, 2007

The reason for this blog

I have created this blog in hopes of shedding some light on certain companies that either will NOT ship to APO addresses, charge higher than normal shipping costs and/or send items parcel post (6-8 week delivery time).

As a military spouse stationed overseas it is difficult to find those certain "comforts" that we can find while in the states. Therefor I tend to turn toward online shopping. I have shopped for everything from books, pjs and formula for my toddler, electronics to vacuum cleaners and have run across parcel post shipping, first class shipping at a higher than normal postage rate (sometimes as much as 4 times as much) and/or companies that won't ship here at all. And if you want to pay shipping twice and are lucky enough to have family that will let you send the items to their house you can have them forward the items on to you. Granted there are now companies that specialize in having items sent to them and then for an additional fee they will ship the items to the APO box. Personally, I am tired of paying shipping twice!

A bit of background on shipping to APO boxes. A company pays the same price to send a package from their location to APO boxes as it would to ship it to NYC. From NYC the military picks up the packages and gets them to the APO post offices for delivery. No matter what the shipping method (First class, priority, express, parcel post, overnight, etc) the military must honor the method the shipper chose to send the package. I just don't see where the extra fees from the shippers come in. The only thing that is different is that the shipper has to fill out a customs form. The extra time/cost it takes to fill out the customs forms can be written into the handling fees that alot of the companies are now charging....or if they want to be generous to those of us making the sacrifice of living so far away from our family/friends and shopping options they can not charge anything extra for the customs forms.

When I shop online I now email the company first to find their shipping methods and costs, then compare the cost by looking at http://www.usps.com/. If the cost is more and/or the company ships via parcel post I will order the product elsewhere. This is how I have come up with the information I have. If you would like to add any information feel free to leave a comment.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I to hav had several problems with babyuniverse.com.

They suck. Did you shop through the aafes website? and did it do something funny in 2006/ 2007?? like yout total was weird?