How can I fix USPS label creation for Australia shipping?

[treh]

Hi everyone,

A customer used the shopify store to have a product shipped to Australia. They purchased a USPS label but on the back-end I am unable to create a label with USPS. 

Any way to fix this? The other shipping options are double/triple the price paid by the customer.

The customer paid the amount that the system calculated for shipping from USA to Australia.

Advice?

Thank you.

[Greta · Accepted solution]

Hi, @treh.

Thank you for your post! I can definitely provide you with some more information on the current situation regarding USPS shipments to Australia.

Effective September 3, 2021, the United States Postal Service (USPS) suspended most international mail delivery to Australia until further notice due to the combined effects of a lack of transportation and COVID-19 restrictions. 

USPS Priority Mail Express International will be the only unaffected service to Australia available as of September 17.

For the time being, merchants will need to purchase labels going to Australia via UPS, DHL, or USPS Priority Mail Express International - otherwise, you can contact other carriers directly to purchase labels outside of Shopify Shipping.

I recommend checking out and bookmarking this USPS international service updates page as it will have the most up to date information for when services resume:

• International Service Alerts - Newsroom - USPS

I have seen other merchants temporarily suspend shipping to Australia while this USPS suspension is in place. For this specific order, you have the option of cancelling and providing the customer with a refund, or seeing if they want to place a new order with an updated shipping price.  

Please let me know if you have any more questions!

[pamKKM]

@Greta  I have to say this is incredibly frustrating. I received our first order, (and it happened to be a large one, of course) and had no clue that this was an issue. But when I tried to create a shipping label, it kept saying on my order page:

"There was a problem buying shipping labels. Review order and try again."

AND

"UPS does not deliver to a PO box" (even though UPS was not selected and we don't even offer it as a service) AND

"The service is unavailable between your origin and destination addresses."

AND

"This address may be incorrect. Review the address and continue if you know the address is correct."

Can you see how confusing this is?? I guess what I am asking is why hasn't Shopify put in more controls here. Either at the end customer side or at our side. If I had received the proper message to begin with about USPS packages not going to Australia - perhaps even with a link to a press release - it would have saved me a lot of headaches. I could have not allowed shipping there. Or if at the end customer side, there could have been an alert that the service she chose was NOT available. Instead, I had FOUR messages. None of which explained the situation at all. 

When I contacted Shopify via chat, it took about 15 minutes for the rep to get back to me with an answer. Though I certainly do understand the difficulty here on everyone's end, this issue with shipping to Australia has been going on since September. Perhaps an alert in your system would have helped because she had no idea what was going on. When I mentioned to your rep that this is problematic for customers, she said "you can add it to your Shipping Policies so your customers are aware". LOLOLOLOL. Seriously?? You don't actually think customers read those do you?? And why is the onus falling on to the end customer? 

There has to be a better solution on Shopify's end to help us all out.

[Greta]

Hi there, @pamKKM.

Thank you for providing your feedback. I definitely understand why receiving all those different messages, and your customer still being able to select the USPS rate at checkout, is not at all ideal for you. 

I know this doesn't solve your problem right now, but I've shared your experience with our development team and put in a request to implement changes either on the customer's side (not allowing them to choose a service that isn't currently being offered), or on the merchant's side (having a clear announcement regarding USPS's suspension of services to Australia). I can't guarantee this will be put into effect, but changes like this can be tracked in the Shopify Changelog.

Please let me know if you have any more questions!

[PaulNewton]

The error messaging does leave much to be desired for shipping issues and other areas of shopify.

The rep was 100% on point about store policy as that is the other end of this bookend: making sure stores have an effective shipping policy that describes interruptions or cancellation behavior.

So even if customers do not read them you still have clear coverage for how YOU choose to remedy such eventualities as a process.

It's no different from a TOS, customers lack of awareness is NOT the point.

https://www.shopify.com/blog/shipping-policy 

Why is the onus falling on to the end customer?

There is no satisfying answer here for a question framed like that. Consumers have as much responsibility as merchants in being aware of policies when purchasing internationally; either that business polices,  or as a matter of law the policies of the source and destination countries.

It's either appreciate that as a business process philosophy and tool, or completely eat the cost and just ship the item so the customer is happy and they get to stay oblivious to logistics issues from a worldwide pandemic.

Notice how that last part set's a business up to pay extra shipping every time it happens, that's not a sustainable practice leading you back to the first part.

That error messaging still sucks though, it's like worse than working blindfolded it's working blindfolded while someone gives you bad info about what's around you.

[Anindita]

Hi @treh,

As @Greta mentioned, USPS suspended most international mail delivery to Australia from September until further notice due to the combined effects of a lack of transportation and COVID-19 restrictions.

For more details, you can refer to this: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shipping/setting-up-and-managing-your-shipping/enabling-shipping-...

And for the time being, you can use UPS, DHL, or FedEx for generating labels.