If you've had your hardware for months and you wanted this "within a reasonable time frame" it would probably have been a good idea to choose a shipping method that doesn't have a transit time of well over a month...
Hey fluffy, I've been reading all this from the beginning and waiting patiently for my order to be processed. But, now I have to say something...
Your last comment is not cool. If someone choose regular shipping over very expensive expedited services, you don't have to be a smart ass about it.
Price, with regular shipping cost is acceptable for product like yours, but price with expedited shipping is definitely not very attractive. If that was my only choice, I wouldn't buy from you, for sure.
Now, it appears that regular shipping takes months, not weeks, while your website portrays different picture. Excuses, like holidays, illegal strikes, etc, are just that, excuses. Not to mentioned that I haven't seen any warning on your website about these issues. There is no any indication that customs pre-clearance (never heard of this before) may take many, many days. Also, now that pictures of received parcels are out there, why don' you include one of them on your website, next to that nice infographics at https://openrigs.com/information/information&information_id=6
From your website:
Quote
Shipping via regular surface mail typically takes up to 6 weeks (longer if there are import delays at the destination country), and via courier typically takes a week or two at the most. Somewhat in the middle is EMS, which normally takes 2-4 weeks to arrive. Note that these timelines are from the day it leaves the country, and excludes the scheduling phase, fabrication, and customs pre-clearance.
All in, for standard items, you are looking at 14-30 working days for it to arrive, sooner if you opt for expedited shipping (EMS) or courier service (not available to all countries). In extremely rare circumstances parcels are held-up by customs at their destination country. In the event that a parcel is well and truly lost, don't worry, all of our shipping options include insurance, and we will replace your order free-of-charge once the relevant paperwork has been received from your local postal service. Our shipping is 100% transparent with various options available at checkout, but as we are shipping from South Africa you may need to pay for customs or import duties at the country of arrival.
All in, for standard items, you are looking at 14-30 working days for it to arrive, sooner if you opt for expedited shipping (EMS) or courier service (not available to all countries). In extremely rare circumstances parcels are held-up by customs at their destination country. In the event that a parcel is well and truly lost, don't worry, all of our shipping options include insurance, and we will replace your order free-of-charge once the relevant paperwork has been received from your local postal service. Our shipping is 100% transparent with various options available at checkout, but as we are shipping from South Africa you may need to pay for customs or import duties at the country of arrival.
For the record, my order is #1333 (08/01/2014). I have opened a ticket (XJP-LMXRU-597) with no response yet.
That comment wasn't meant to be a smart ass comment - I was merely pointing out that there seems to be no correlation between his expectation and the shipping method.
There was no mention of the strike on the delivery and returns policy because it only affected a portion of parcels by delaying their ability to be processed and track - there's no use warning people who are about to order, as by the time their parcel ships the strike will be over, and people who have already ordered won't go check the delivery and returns policy page for updates.
Surface mail delivery is hugely unpredictable. We have a customer in Germany that received it via surface mail in 4 weeks. We have customers in the US that received it after 6 weeks. Thus, per the suggestion that has been made previously in this thread, we increased our estimated transit time for surface mail to 6-10 weeks to cover eventualities. I certainly don't begrudge anyone who chooses surface mail shipping, but then there has to be a correlation between the expected arrival and the shipping method chosen.
Thanks for giving me your ticket number - looks like we have tickets getting flagged as spam, I thought we'd removed all the false positives but it looks like there are a bunch in there again. I think we're just going to turn spam filtering off for OpenRigs tickets for a while.