World Wide Shipping!

I live in a country, which turned from an agricultural nation into industrial in a relatively short period, after World War II. This meant people traded working long hours on the fields into working long hours in the factories. Hobbies and pastimes had to be functional and serve the community, or at least the immediate family. Not until the upswing of the 1980s, we started to develop more spare time and leisure activities, kind of, and the world was about to open up.

However, with that kind of baggage, not ‘til the very last couple of decades, the only approved hobbies or pastimes here have been endurance sports, golf or getting drunk. The last one is now effectively replaced by getting offended by something someone wrote on the Interwebs, though. Such nonsense as collecting movie memorabilia would be considered as ‘kids’ play’, and surprisingly many people from the baby boom generation actually hate science fiction. My in-laws for example. I can remember us accidentally watching E.T. on TV one Christmas, everything was fine until the kids on the run with bicycles took off to air, that was the point when my father-in-law started to moan, and the channel changed into another one. As a kid, my wife never read bedtime stories, or fairy tales either, and hence she also hates science fiction or fantasy.

Under that light, it’s amazing I have my home country, Finland, even pinned in my shipping map. But it is, there are more lightsabre enthusiasts in my neighbourhood than I had anticipated. The number of orders shipped inside Finland isn’t huge, but still, compared to the population, still something. However, from the very beginning I knew I had to go international, because that’s where the market was for collectible toys of this sort.

While this wasn’t generally an issue, I was in competitive disadvantage from scratch, due to the shipping methods offered. I’m mostly using our national postal service, Posti, because courier services here aren’t very competitive, price-wise. I’d have to get a lot more volume to get better quotes from couriers. But against its global, or even European-wide rivals, Posti isn’t very competitive either. Prices are high, if I order stuff from Germany, for example, that package travels to me here at much lower cost than a similar package reaches its domestic destination here in Finland. On top of it, Posti is also a bitch partner to work with. Their prices are high, and if their bill is one day overdue, they move it to a debt collecting agency. What happens if a package gets lost? Usually not much, for quite some time anyway. The process time for even insured lost shipment claims easily takes 5 months.

Many Etsy sellers, for instance, offer free shipping. I don’t have that kind of luxury. I called my postal service and asked if they could give me free shipping. They laughed at me and hung up. Despite this, I have been glad to offer international shipping, it takes a bit more paperwork but I’ve got quite good at it, and making customers happy through this entire rock has been rewarding. There are not a great deal of locations I couldn’t ship to, although I have avoided a few because even Posti classifies them as high risk destinations for package loss or theft.

But want to see where I have sent stuff so far? Here you go!

Obviously, the United States alone leads the chart, by a huge margin. Over there this kind of hobby has longer roots, wider acceptance and the number of enthusiasts is large. It has been wonderful to gain so many customers and even friends there, considering there’s already a lot of options and alternatives at lower shipping costs in their own country.

Second to that comes a pack of Japan, Australia and Canada. The numbers of orders sent to those countries are far smaller than to the US, but these three would still occupy the remaining pole positions. Japan, for example, claimed a large cut from our KAM mini runs in the past.

Here in the old continent, the United Kingdom has been one of the main destinations, partially because I have a good associate there who takes care of the FX install jobs I sometimes get from my customers. It’s been sad, though, that after Brexit the traffic between us two has been more troublesome. If you think our postal service is expensive, our customs office dials it up to eleven.

In mainland Europe, Germany and France are leading, but Spain, Italy and the Netherlands are following. Switzerland and Portugal also got a couple of hits. Further east we have pins on Poland, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.

Aside from Finland, Sweden and Denmark have been active from the Scandinavian bloc. No orders from Norway, but in the land of fjords the customs office has the citizens in even tighter clutches than here, so in that light I can also understand the lack of correspondence.

Moving on further in the map, finding more exotic countries. Well maybe not exotic to you, but exotic from my point of view! Singapore has actually received multiple shipments from us, and Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan marking one hit wonders. The last one required such a long address that it barely fit my postal service’s shipping label. The last one hit wonder demonstrably landed in Mexico. I could swear there was one package heading to New Zealand just recently, but I couldn't find a shipping document of that...

From the top of my head, this counts 23 confirmed nations, right? Did I miss some? Post a comment here if I did!