Well DHL is a horrible company that’s why I pay $1 per book to ship 2 day FedEx. Basically DHL will grab your package hold it for weeks just to put it in a post office and ship it USPS when they get around to it. So basically your paying a middle man to take your package from tfaw to the post office. If I were tfaw I would drop DHL and negotiate a shipping discount with the Postmaster at my local post office. That would fix the shipping times but not the new delayed processing times.
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It’s also illegal to ship comics using media mail.
Trust me, no one is more frustrated at things being slow right now than us. It doesn’t help that we haven’t had two weeks in a row of on time shipments from Diamond since last year. Sometimes due to weather, sometimes due to “no idea why it was delayed”.
We can look into if DHL has been taking longer lately and other options. But the basic fact is that right now for reasons a lot of people know, mailing stuff sucks. Prices have gone up, speed has gone down, and small businesses and retailers are left trying to deal with people upset at shipping price and time increases while Amazon, Walmart, etc. either use their own logistics to deliver faster or strong-arm better deals and speeds through the private companies.
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We are more complaining about how long tfaw takes to process, DHL isn’t processing our order at your warehouse. You are explaining why it’s taking DHL 2 weeks to ship but not why orders are taking 2-3 weeks to process in house, before it even gets into any shippers hands …not trying to bash you specifically Brendon as I know that is not in your job description.
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Is it illegal to ship all comics media mail or just the ones with ads? Asking for a friend.
If you read the rules, it seems like they’re loosely worded to suit USPS mood for that day in how they want to handle.
Free shipping is the way to go… I kno we all spend hundreds of dollars at Tfaw. That free shipping would help. Or a flare rate. And definitely get rid of DHL. The only place I know that uses them.
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Discount comic book service has a deal with fed ex where they can charge a flat rate of $7.50. If you guys worked out a deal like that with them, it would move faster and be cheaper for the both of us.
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That’s probably just what they calculated to charge customers not what their actual rate is. Slightly less for larger orders, higher for small orders.
Simplifying shipping costs is something we’re always looking into. And figuring out flat rates/numbers where in the end it balances out. But with thousands of orders to different states and so many variables it’s not an easy solution to just figure out in a day of number crunching. Especially with postal rates continuously going up lately.
Here’s where it gets confusing:
Books, consisting wholly of reading matter, scholarly bibliography, or reading matter with incidental blank spaces for notations and containing no advertising, except for incidental announcements of books.
So most indie books don’t have advertisements in them, the ones that do are normally ads for other Image books. Novels do this same thing from the publishers in the back pages. But you can find elsewhere on USPS site that claims “no comic books” are allowed yet go on to claim books with no ads are allowed with the above rule.
The worst that happens is USPS makes you pay for the difference and I can only suggest, don’t use media mail label on your “cardboard gemini comic mailer” as that’s just a red flag you’re shipping comics with potential ads within them. I think that’s how most get caught, using comic mailers as those are subjected to inspection.
I’ve had people ship First Class using Priority Mail packaging, which is a no no. So it’s all just a matter of their mood if they decide to go after you or not.
Even if the comic has no advertising their policy has been comics =/= media mail. Graphic novels can possibly but they largely depend on if the people inspecting it realize the difference.
MEDIA MAIL SERVICE they state on here comic books do not meet the standard. And if you read through the actual policy guidelines they also don’t qualify.
Maybe in the future they’ll change it so that comics without advertising can be sent media mail, but then it would be a matter of having to go through every comic to check for ads or to have publishers decide as a whole their comics do/don’t have ads, and being able to split those up in inventory systems for shipping and it becomes a whole thing.
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I think if you go with fed ex, you’ll see more customer satisfaction, regardless. If $7.50 is the average cost and you charge that much for every shipment, it should cover your cost. Most of dcbs’ orders are larger than 10 comics, so their actual rate can’t be that bad if they only charge $7.50.
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It depends on where you are tbh. We have a lot of customers who explicity ask us to never send anything via FedEx even if it’s the cheapest because in their area FedEx is slow, loses things, treats packages poorly, etc.
DHL in the past for us has been the best balance of speed and price. But if their speed has been getting worse lately and price isn’t a huge savings anymore it may be worth re-examining.
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Fair enough. I think if you present fed ex with a reasonable deal and work it out, everyone will benefit. Problems with them seem to be the exception, not the rule.
That’s what’s silly too… on the link I provided, they don’t mention comics in the rules. It’s like they got mixed policies and rules on different pages where they need to combine them to make sure everything is aligned. 
At this level of governance, you’re no longer dealing with statutes or case law, you’re dealing with USPS administrative rules. It’s an important distinction because governmental agencies have broad latitude to interpret their own rules once promulgated without review of a court. So, in a sense, Poyo, you’re not wrong.
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If my comics came with a flare, I would pay that rate.
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I don’t think that’s the worst that happens. I got a letter from the US Postmaster General once for using Media Mail and just paying the difference when caught. They dinged me enough to notice. They were threatening some pretty heavy-handed consequences- i.e. a massive fine and a jail term I’m sure they had no intention of pursuing, but still scary. I’m no big-time seller. Imagine how pissed they’d be at TFAW.
Book publishers had a strong lobby when the rules were written. Comic book publishers did not,
If you read the free Priority Mail boxes and packaging they give you for free, they claim it is USPS property and must be used as described. I guess we should return all those used boxes after we open back to USPS, since they own them.
