Shipping increased

General
1

In the beginning of Oct 2015 I bought Photon with shipping fee around 10$ (ship to Vietnam). Today I visited Particle’s store to shop new Photons and realized that shipping cost dramatically increased. Lowest fee is $110. I have no clue what caused such huge change?

4

Hello @tdphan

Thank you for your post! Many people have seen changes in their shipping options and prices when we updated our store. There are a couple reasons for this:

  1. When we updated the store we realized that our true shipping costs were significantly higher than we had been displaying. We were able to correct this error and more accurately reflect true shipping costs with the website update.

  2. Our current shipping options are calculated based on carrier (either USPS or UPS) estimates, which depend on the size and weight of the package, as well as the delivery address. As we continue to improve our site and it’s integration with our shipping providers, you may see shipping rates change slightly. In fact, after your message we dug in and found that the integration between the carries and our site had a bug that we corrected, so you should see slightly lower international shipping prices now.

Unfortunately, we have very little control over shipping prices, but here are some tips and tricks to keep shipping costs down:

  1. One of the biggest factors in shipping cost is the weight of the total shipment, and shippers round any shipment up to the nearest pound. That means it costs about the same to ship one Photon as it does to ship 5 Photons. You will find the shipping price per product is drastically reduced by combining shipments.

  2. We ship all our products from California, but we have many distributors around the world (you can find a list of some our international distributors here). If any of our distributors are located closer to you, they may be able to provide lower shipping costs.

I hope this helps!

~Heather

5

Hello @heather

Thank you for your post.

Both times, when I backed on Kickstarter and bought in October the shipping cost was only $10. I know that shipping costs are set by other people. How ever you could find couple of carriers with more options for us to choose. Rely on only USPS may cause such kind of problems when shipping costs increase more than 10 times.

6

Shipping to DK changed from 14$ to 85$ with the store change with UPS being the only option, ouch.

(Update) Looked for distributors, there is a few good alternatives so I will live, even if it means I cant use the force :wink:
Seeed has them for 19$ and currently gives 30% coupon for use on Dec 9, so could have ordered them together with my pcbs…
And www.watterott.com has them for 21eur including EU VAT which is pretty good deal for EU users.

7

Same here. 76$ plus VAT for 3 Photon’s weight is way out of cheap or reasonable. Wrong shipper, IMHO.

8

I just backed Readbear Duo project on Kickstarter. This is San Francisco based company like Particle. The shipping cost is only $5 to my country. Amazing.

9

Unfortunatly there is noone distributing P1 modules anywhere. i wanted to get the cyber monday deals for 10 P1 modules but cancelled it right away because of the shipping costs.

10

So did I. :cry:

11

This is just because shipping is 99.9% from Hong Kong, and you probably will end paying zero fees since they declare an < 10$ value. But stuff arrives after around 30 days then (at least in Europe).