I think this wait is unreasonable

Latest I've received from Solidus about coins I bought in April.

Dear Mr. C------



there is an update now:



Dispatch of goods for business customers / contract customers:

Shipments to the USA will be possible again from September 15, 2020. Please note that these shipments will be transported to the USA by sea until further notice. Very long delivery times of at least 25-30 days must be expected. For destinations in the western United States or in remote regions, the transit time can be significantly longer.


So we will send it asap. I'm expecting long queues at the Post offices!



mit freundlichen Grüßen / all the best

I think this is a bit unreasonable and will bring about my not bidding in any future Solidus auctions.

 

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Wow, are they taking them over by canoe?

 

When did you win the items to begin with?

EDIT: I just saw that you bought them in April.
Yeah I definitely wouldn't be buying from them again.

 

Items I won on September 1 in the latest Timeline UK auction (not coins) were shipped September 10 and were in New York September 12, and the UK is not in some magical pandemic-free zone, so COVID is no excuse. If you bought coins in April and they still haven't been shipped, you should get your money back and never buy from them again. That level of poor customer service is staggering.

 

I bought a coin from Solidus paid for on June 2nd. I never received it, emailed them at the end of July. They told me they would be begin shipping coins to the US in September. I didn't get a letter like this. Maybe they could use FedEx if their mail system sucks this bad.

 

The coins I bought in April were a lot of five Alexander III AEs for my grand kids, so I am kind of stuck with waiting them out. If I cancel and ask for a refund, I have to start all over finding five new coins for Christmas.

 

They did offer the FedEx option for an additional 30EUR. The lot I bought cost 160EUR, so the additional cost was not really an option.

 

Too bad. I just received a coin after a 6-week wait. It doesn't help that it was two weeks between my order and the ship date, but I suppose August is vacation time in Europe.

 

Nice to give coins to grandkids. But, if you don't get them soon you may have more grandkids. It happens to me all the time.

 

Nothing else to do during quarantine...

 

I have 6 kids, 13 grandkids and 20 great grandkids. They just happen for no known reason. Buy 15 mint sets and there will all of a sudden be 16 kids to give them to.

 

Yikes!

COVID is definitely impacting shipments, especially worldwide, but not enough to justify simply not sending coins out. India has apparently shut down all air mail going out of the country - I'm still waiting on a $60 order that I won back in late March. Fortunately the seller and I have been doing business for a long time, and I know that he won't swindle me out of my money.

Hopefully the coins actually do ship this month!

 

Yes, of course. Now I remember that they did offer that. But yes it's too steep for the amount I paid for the coin.

 

Maybe I'm missing something here. They notified you of significant delays due to the global pandemic, and even offered you a fast shipping option that was still available to them. You decided to opt out of the fast shipping option offered to you, and now you're complaining and saying you're not going to do business with them anymore because you don't like your decision?

The regular post options available to them are out of their hands. It has literally nothing to do with their customer service. I don't see what else they could have done for you. Everyone knows shipping has been challenging during the pandemic. You take that into account when you buy, knowing that fast options may cost a bit more, and you have faith that people are doing their best to get your coins to you in these trying times.

 

Except for the British, who seem to have no pandemic-related issues at all with shipping items to the United States. By air, no less, not by sea. And by regular post, not expedited.

Also, I bought a coin from a different German shop on June 17, 2020. They shipped it June 18. I received it in the U.S. on June 25.

How can one German shop have no problem shipping "during a pandemic" and another German shop can't ship something in five months?

 

Not every country is the same. They have different relationships with the US, different postal services, and different levels of heightened response to the pandemic. Some places like Hong Kong are still not allowing shipments to the US. It is not surprising that a country with very close ties to the US like Great Britain would have fewer restrictions in place for the mail currently.

Given your example of shipping on June 18th and receiving it in the US on the 25th, they clearly mailed it with an international express service like EMS. That is literally the only way it would get to you in that timeframe. Air mail would take a couple weeks even in the best of cases without the additional customs and mail delays in place now.

Bulk rate/airmail packages were suspended for a long time from Germany. Some dealers that include shipping may opt to pay for EMS out of their own pocket to keep deliveries going, some may include it in the price/fees, etc. In this case, the coin was not expensive enough for that to make sense. They offered the express service option and it was declined.

 

I guess that depends on the shipping method they use and the risk they are willing to take. To give three examples:

1.) I won some coins from a well-known and respected Spanish auction in March. They shipped them in early April when the post offices in Spain had reopened. At that time, I was still living in California. Due to COVID-related delays, the coins spent more than three months in customs. By mid July, when they were finally delivered, I had moved to Germany. Fortunately, I was able to redirect my mail to an American friend, who accepted the package and will give it to me next time we meet. Obviously, that's a difficult situation for the auction house – I'm pretty certain they had to deal with a lot of nervous customers who assumed, maybe even correctly, that their shipments were lost and demanded refunds.

2.) Another shipment from Austria took a mere three weeks, an envelope from Germany (not coins) just eight days. Delivery times appeared to be rather unpredictable and depend on both the shipping company and the type and size of the parcel.

3.) About eight weeks ago, I mailed a small consignment from Germany to an auction house in Canada (you can imagine which one). To my knowledge, my coins haven't arrived in Canada yet. The friendly employee at the post office told me that tracking to the US and Canada doesn't really work at this moment. All overseas parcels and packages are currently shipped via sea freight, which can take a long time, or a short time, or anything in between. If I were a professional seller, I probably would think twice before I sent out a valuable shipment in this situation...

 

I have had no problems during the pandemic receiving coins from the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Belgium, each time sent by DHL Express or Federal Express for a charge between $20 and $30 more than regular shipping. Which I've been happy to pay for the faster service, as well as the absence of concern regarding the coin being held up for weeks in the US Postal Service (or in Customs) after arrival in the USA.

The one exception is Germany. The one time I bought a coin during the pandemic from a German dealer (Münzhandlung Ritter in Düsseldorf via MA-Shops, at the end of June), the experience was absolutely wretched. First, I was told that the German postal service simply does not ship to the USA in the current situation, so if I bought the coin I would have to wait an unknown number of months until it could be shipped. I was also told that the charge for DHL Premium Package Service -- the only available DHL service to the USA during the pandemic -- was $50(!), or almost $40 more than regular international shipping. But I wanted the coin, so I stupidly agreed. What I didn't realize is that "DHL Premium Package Service" has nothing to do with DHL Express, and that DHL itself is a German company that is simply a division of Deutsche Post. So there was nothing "express" about the shipment. It took more than a week for the package to leave Germany, and once it arrived in the USA, instead of delivering it directly to me (as DHL Express does, regardless of the country of origin), DHL simply handed the package over to the US Postal Service, where it sat for more than a month with no further tracking updates. The package was finally delivered about a week after I submitted a missing mail form to the USPS (a "trick" that has worked each of the three times I've tried it for packages seemingly frozen in the US postal system).

The bottom line is that I'm staying far away from German dealers until this situation changes. Which effectively rules out more than half the dealers on MA-Shops, which seems to be a primarily German enterprise.

I did just order a coin from Sweden to be sent by DHL Express, so I'll see how that works.

 

I had a similar experience with some coins from MA-shops sold by German dealers. I eventually went through with a faster shipping option for 2 coins from Germany and did eventually get them, but it took months. After that I simply stopped ordering coins from Germany. It's too risky. Even the USPS delivering packages from elsewhere in the US is somewhat unreliable right now.

The key takeaway here in general is that this has been a problem across Germany. It's not any dealer in particular. So everyone don't blame any particular dealer here - German dealers are just as upset about the unreliable mail as you are. It is costing them business.

 

The only thing for which I blame Münzhandlung Ritter is their failure to explain to me that the DHL service they said they could use was not the same as DHL Express (which is the service I had specifically asked them about), and that the package was simply going to be handed over to the USPS upon its arrival in this country. If they had told me that, I never would have purchased the coin given the substantial extra DHL charge. Perhaps it was the language barrier, since the person with whom I communicated was obviously not very fluent in English. I didn't bother complaining, since I did get the coin eventually.