So, when I first began selling on Etsy back in 2009 (16 years ago!), shipping to the US was straightforward. Select your preferred service, fill out the relevant customs forms, pay and done. And it was so much cheaper then too. Back then I used to send orders untracked, in a sort of optimistic cloud. Orders rarely went missing or got lost, but it meant that my US customers couldn't track their orders, and neither could I. So in those early days I would be of little help rather than as a sort of postal cheerleader. It did keep shipping costs low for my customers, but the downside, of losing the order into a void until it reappeared in their mailbox, wasn't great.
My shipping method is very different today. Every order I send overseas is fully tracked. This has cost implications for my customers but honestly it seems to work well, and it feels great to be able to tell them where a parcel is, what's happening to it, and let them know more accurately when it will arrive.
And now, additional tarriffs. This has added an extra cost to shipping that I've unfortuantely had to roll into shipping costs to the US. It's never a good feeling to raise costs. Many postal services around the globe have paused shipping to the US compltely while they rush to implement a tariff collection system.
So its' been a major source of small business shipping stress this month and the last. But, instead of the shipping chaos I had been expecting, it's staggering how quick shipping has been from the UK to the US these past two weeks. I'm not fooling myself that this will continue, but I believe it's a by-product of the huge drop shipping volumes into the great customs warehouses in Chicago, New York and LA. I did read one figue of a drop of 80%. This is obviously a blip, which I expect to fade when more postal services figure out a tariff collection method, but for now it's very interestingly different.
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