Shipping handling by Aliexpress suppliers

[amam]

Hello everyone,

Have you ever faced a situation where you have an order from Ali Express supplier and the buyer was called to go to the post office, clear the customs and pay extra $10 on top of what he already paid on Ali Express (both product price and shipping price).
I am having a new store and wanted to test myself before launching the store so I purchases an item from my store and this is what happened. I don't want this bad experience to happen to the customers so it is good that I tried it myself first.
Whom to blame here, Ali Express? the supplier? the shipping company? and whom to contact (I already contacted the supplier and he said that he will check but nothing happened so far). Reaching Ali Express is difficult.
If this happened to you and if you have an idea on how to overcome this, please let me know.
Note: This happened with shipping to a country that don't have e-packet. It was shipped through standard shipping. I am not sure if we can face the same situation with epacket shipping. and how to avoid this to happen.
Your feedback is appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Mar]

Have you ever faced a situation where you have an order from Ali Express supplier and the buyer was called to go to the post office, clear the customs and pay extra $10 on top of what he already paid on Ali Express (both product price and shipping price).
I am having a new store and wanted to test myself before launching the store so I purchases an item from my store and this is what happened. I don't want this bad experience to happen to the customers so it is good that I tried it myself first.
Whom to blame here, Ali Express? the supplier? the shipping company? and whom to contact (I already contacted the supplier and he said that he will check but nothing happened so far). Reaching Ali Express is difficult.
If this happened to you and if you have an idea on how to overcome this, please let me know.
Note: This happened with shipping to a country that don't have e-packet. It was shipped through standard shipping. I am not sure if we can face the same situation with epacket shipping. and how to avoid this to happen.
Your feedback is appreciated.

Did you order and pay directly to a seller?

If you did not change the default Shipping & Delivery page, you can see the statement: "We are not responsible for any custom fees once the items have shipped. By purchasing our products, you consent that one or more packages may be shipped to you and may get custom fees when they arrive to your country." Customs regulation differ from country to country. If a country's custom require custom duty to the imported product, it is normal. Nobody is to blame.

 

[amam]

Thanks for your response.
I understand that this is something that we have to live with. Anything that can be done to avoid his issue from happening? Probably shipping setting in the Alidropship plugin to tell the seller to include custom fees?
So we have to accept that we may end up with unhappy customers who won't buy from us again? If this happened to me as a buyer I won't buy again from that store.
Is this common when dropshipping to US/ Canada / UK? or is it because I tested shipping to a non-epacket country. I heard that epacket shipping already handles the customs automatically - not sure if this is true)

 

[Mar]

So we have to accept that we may end up with unhappy customers who won't buy from us again? If this happened to me as a buyer I won't buy again from that store.

Your store has nothing to do with how customs of a country collect tax of imported products. If customs of a country require tax duty of a product from your store, it would also require of products from other stores. Ali Express has this practice of marking the cost of the product way down to avoid customers pay import tax, but there is no guarantee. Again, it is the customs regulation of the country, not your store.