I took the plunge and tried to ship a (totally innocuous) book in for my daughters birthday. I had left it a bit late

I used Amazon who have always been great in the past in other counties and tried to get it with two day delivery for an extra charge.

It was stopped by customs for "inspection" and will now take another 3 or 4 days to arrive and this is after i faxed them my passport, visa, entry dates.

Amazon have been great and refunded the extra charge but of course the Birthday will be past now.

Is priority delivery via UPS (or others) essentially not worth bothering with here in China?

I hadn't used them here before as i was worried about having to pay extra duty but i didn't realise that books were subject to delays of a few days. Have other people had this happen to them?

On another note UPS were virtually useless when i called to see what was going on. Really poor service from them in fact.

All courier services specifically note that Customs issues are beyond their control,. Books Do sometimes get stopped and unfortunately yours did. But i dislike UPS anyhow... though honestly, if something absolutely positively HAS TO get somewhere overnight...it won't.

But seriously, I think priority shipping does usually get better results as documents I ship from teh US via FedEx are very quick, and priority service means deliveries over the weekend when necessary.

caramello wrote:I took the plunge and tried to ship a (totally innocuous) book in for my daughters birthday. I had left it a bit late

I used Amazon who have always been great in the past in other counties and tried to get it with two day delivery for an extra charge.

It was stopped by customs for "inspection" and will now take another 3 or 4 days to arrive and this is after i faxed them my passport, visa, entry dates.

Amazon have been great and refunded the extra charge but of course the Birthday will be past now.

Is priority delivery via UPS (or others) essentially not worth bothering with here in China?

I hadn't used them here before as i was worried about having to pay extra duty but i didn't realise that books were subject to delays of a few days. Have other people had this happen to them?

On another note UPS were virtually useless when i called to see what was going on. Really poor service from them in fact.

Exactly the same with me. Ordered a book in a rush from Amazon as I needed it for work and although it arrived in China quickly it took days to get it out of customs.

UPS were also poor. They called me to ask for my passort copy etc, which I sent them within the hour. Then nothing happened for days and the UPS online tracker said they they were "waiting for customers documents" (ie passport). The person dealling with it could not be reached.

Bottom line is that it was not worth it.

Guess I was lucky last year. Ordered DVD and books from Amazon with expedited shipping and I got it within 4 days from the US. Another time I ordered from Amazon with normal shipping and I noticed the package came from Hong Kong within 10 days. Either case, customs didn't inspect my package. Both times I ordered it was less than the max allowed (I think 10 DVDs/books per shipment) by customs. Don't remember where I found info about this limit.

Perhaps they're tightening their security on incoming packages, just like they're scanning luggages of arriving passengers at PuDong?

I agree with Yu, UPS sucks.

The trick with express shipments is that the declared value must be under $50. If under $50, they needn't pass through the customs cage. $50 and over will get caged.

Also, MoonOverMiami is probably right that things get inspected more now because of the Olympics. Just like now when you must show ID to send domestic EMS to any city which will host an Olympic event.