About shipping to Eastern Europe and related questions at Decent
mipe wrote: Hi,
as your company grows, do you have any plans to expand your distribution centers? Right know, the shipping and taxes are the main reason for me not to get one of your machines. I mean the prices are outrageous. The lowest price for shipping to Slovakia (part of EU event Euro zone) is 586.36 € shipping + 237.02 € tax = 823.38 € total. And that's the TNT express which is the slowest and in my option not the most reliable one. The cheapest UPS shipping is 1184.54 € shipping + 363.14 € tax = 1547.68 € total, I mean that's 45% of the price of DE1Pro (and that's the cheapest UPS option). Also do you have any plans to release your app on iOS platform?
If I may, I'd like to answer your question in two parts:
- logistics costs worldwide
- advice for your specific case.
Having a local distribution center wouldn't solve the problem, as the real problem is “moving things around the world is, at the moment, very expensive, especially in places with little competition.”
Let me use the USA as an example.
- pre-COVID, it cost $170 to ship a DE1 via UPS, they were the least expensive, by a wide margin
- after covid, UPS continually increased their prices to level which I would consider “price gouging”, into the $450 range.
- unfortunately for UPS, this attracted more competition to the HK->USA route, and now UPS's rate ($613) is laughably abusive, with DHL offering rates that are approaching pre-COVID levels.
In Slovakia, a lack of competition in the logistics business has created similar price gouging:
TNT - Express to Slovakia :
586.36 € shipping + 237.02 € tax = 823.38 € total
If you have your DE1 delivered “down the Danube” to neighboring Vienna, you'll save quite a bit of money.
TNT - Express to Austria:
335.75 € shipping + 190.07 € tax = 525.82 € total
Shipping to Slovakia is 75% more expensive than shipping to Austria.
And incredibly, UPS is even charging you 25% more tax to send directly to Slovakia as compared to Austria.
Yes, it's absurd that an hour drive away produces such a different set of shipping rates:
and that is in fact what many “Eastern” European customers of ours are doing.
Order a DE1 shipping to your neighboring country, where logistics and taxes are lower, and go pick your machine up.
Since we ship the DE1 to you in a suitcase with 4 rolling wheels, this is easy to arrange. A weekend in Vienna is not so awful a trip. The cost savings that you didn't give to UPS will more than pay for it.
Updated 2022/11/29