4 ms·

There's something severely screwy with their shipping. To my rural US location, it'd cost $12 for the cheapest shipping for just one Ox64. I've shipped 15lb/7kg

by jdiff 3y ago

There's something severely screwy with their shipping. To my rural US location, it'd cost $12 for the cheapest shipping for just one Ox64. I've shipped 15lb/7kg, microwave-oven-sized packages more than a thousand miles for that price. It just should not cost that much. A USPS priority flat rate box costs less than that even for your average non-commercial human individual.

tomcam 3y ago
> I've shipped 15lb/7kg, microwave-oven-sized packages more than a thousand miles for that price. Mind telling me what shipping method?
- jdiff 3y ago
  USPS or FedEx Ground via EasyPost, whichever's cheaper on a given day for a given package. I just punched in the numbers and a 6x6" padded envelope weighing a half a pound would cost us $4.12. I just shipped a 22x16x17" package weighing 34lbs for $21.65. And we're a small rural shirt shop, most people are ordering shirts for family reunions and sorts teams. Most days we don't ship anything, so we have very little volume.
  - tomcam 3y ago
    First of all, I would love to hear how you ended up in that business. Do you silkscreen or make actual shirts or what? Second, is there some kind of website you have to determine the cheapest shipping that day? Thanks much!
    - jdiff 3y ago
      Oh unfortunately there's no interesting tales in a rural area like this lol. I needed a job, stumbled on this listing, sent off an email, got told to swing by the shop some time. Most people here wear at least a little of everyone else's hats. I emulse and burn screens, weed out lots of vinyl, cut and grommet banners, help cover graphic design, and as far as actually making shirts and hats I'm mainly just on the heat presses with the vinyls and transfer films. And there is, sorta. While our shipping goes through EasyPost, we rarely interact directly with it. Instead our shop uses a web app called Printavo to manage orders. After feeding it the package details it interfaces with EasyPost (very helpfully autofilling the customer's details from the invoice) and displays all available shipping options from USPS, UPS, and FedEx along with prices for all of them. Sometimes the cheapest shipping varies box by box, but in my experience it's always either USPS Priority Mail or (more often) FedEx Ground. And never, ever anything UPS. Kinda confusingly, I've never seen any of that info on EasyPost itself, just Printavo's wrapper around it.
      - tomcam 3y ago
        Loved hearing about your day. Thank you. Clearly every day is different from the last.
  - Roark66 3y ago
    Nice, I've used USPS a lot in the past buying vintage(very heavy) ham radio and electronics test equipment shipping from USA to Poland. The prices were really good. For really heavy stuff there are specialised "cheap" shipping services. Like Polonez on my route, no doubt others for other countries. Funny story, USPS lost one of my packages (containing a pretty rare device). I filled in the "lost property form" and I supplied lots of pictures, the serial number etc(from the ebay auction). 2 years later it arrives unexpectedly. :-D So, the morale of this story is: USPS lost package forms are a real thing and there is actually a chance they'll find it!
Roark66 3y ago
Very much so. Also anyone pointing it out in their forums gets ignored. On discord all you get as an answer is "shipping is hard". I got really pissed off once, because I invested a lot of time into developing for their products(soquartz boards, other quartz64 products). So I genuinely wanted to help them resolve this shipping (at least to Eu, as that's the logistics market I know). What I got back, was essentially being accused of being rude by trying to get to the bottom of it why is it so hard for them, in addition to repeatedly being assured "they work as hard as they can, and they have very competent people so need no help" as well as "they're having problems with customs and stuff". Still, 6 months later they haven't figured it out. From a private conversation with one person "in the know" they claimed its difficult because there are various tax systems in the EU (so what, there are only 27 countries, figure one a month, also it is way more unified now that few years ago when it somehow worked fine for them), that they even have problems shipping to their EU store, that they ship from HongKong and Singapore, despite most of their boards being made in China and that makes it difficult, that their owner "is not China based so they can't use Aliexpress (they could use an intermediary, even with a 20% cut it would still be twice cheaper to ship like this)", that some people in Czech Republic would order cheap boards, then when they were asked to pay few bucks for the lack of EU VAT handling by the seller, declined and Pine had to foot the bill(we're literally talking about $5 bucks), and so and so on. Eventually I decided I'm 50% convinced they do it on purpose to "help" their EU store, and the other 50% is they simply don't care enough. They just cover the biggest markets and population centers, like shipping to Germany in EU was still available for 12EUR last time I checked. So, no, I'm not buying their risc V board. Id rather get Sipeed's board that I can pay $11 for, but get it shipped for few bucks from China. The whole design is open too.

by jdiff 3y ago

tomcam 3y ago

> I've shipped 15lb/7kg, microwave-oven-sized packages more than a thousand miles for that price. Mind telling me what shipping method?

jdiff 3y ago
USPS or FedEx Ground via EasyPost, whichever's cheaper on a given day for a given package. I just punched in the numbers and a 6x6" padded envelope weighing a half a pound would cost us $4.12. I just shipped a 22x16x17" package weighing 34lbs for $21.65. And we're a small rural shirt shop, most people are ordering shirts for family reunions and sorts teams. Most days we don't ship anything, so we have very little volume.
- tomcam 3y ago
  First of all, I would love to hear how you ended up in that business. Do you silkscreen or make actual shirts or what? Second, is there some kind of website you have to determine the cheapest shipping that day? Thanks much!
  - jdiff 3y ago
    Oh unfortunately there's no interesting tales in a rural area like this lol. I needed a job, stumbled on this listing, sent off an email, got told to swing by the shop some time. Most people here wear at least a little of everyone else's hats. I emulse and burn screens, weed out lots of vinyl, cut and grommet banners, help cover graphic design, and as far as actually making shirts and hats I'm mainly just on the heat presses with the vinyls and transfer films. And there is, sorta. While our shipping goes through EasyPost, we rarely interact directly with it. Instead our shop uses a web app called Printavo to manage orders. After feeding it the package details it interfaces with EasyPost (very helpfully autofilling the customer's details from the invoice) and displays all available shipping options from USPS, UPS, and FedEx along with prices for all of them. Sometimes the cheapest shipping varies box by box, but in my experience it's always either USPS Priority Mail or (more often) FedEx Ground. And never, ever anything UPS. Kinda confusingly, I've never seen any of that info on EasyPost itself, just Printavo's wrapper around it.
    - tomcam 3y ago
      Loved hearing about your day. Thank you. Clearly every day is different from the last.
- Roark66 3y ago
  Nice, I've used USPS a lot in the past buying vintage(very heavy) ham radio and electronics test equipment shipping from USA to Poland. The prices were really good. For really heavy stuff there are specialised "cheap" shipping services. Like Polonez on my route, no doubt others for other countries. Funny story, USPS lost one of my packages (containing a pretty rare device). I filled in the "lost property form" and I supplied lots of pictures, the serial number etc(from the ebay auction). 2 years later it arrives unexpectedly. :-D So, the morale of this story is: USPS lost package forms are a real thing and there is actually a chance they'll find it!

Roark66 3y ago

Very much so. Also anyone pointing it out in their forums gets ignored. On discord all you get as an answer is "shipping is hard". I got really pissed off once, because I invested a lot of time into developing for their products(soquartz boards, other quartz64 products). So I genuinely wanted to help them resolve this shipping (at least to Eu, as that's the logistics market I know). What I got back, was essentially being accused of being rude by trying to get to the bottom of it why is it so hard for them, in addition to repeatedly being assured "they work as hard as they can, and they have very competent people so need no help" as well as "they're having problems with customs and stuff". Still, 6 months later they haven't figured it out. From a private conversation with one person "in the know" they claimed its difficult because there are various tax systems in the EU (so what, there are only 27 countries, figure one a month, also it is way more unified now that few years ago when it somehow worked fine for them), that they even have problems shipping to their EU store, that they ship from HongKong and Singapore, despite most of their boards being made in China and that makes it difficult, that their owner "is not China based so they can't use Aliexpress (they could use an intermediary, even with a 20% cut it would still be twice cheaper to ship like this)", that some people in Czech Republic would order cheap boards, then when they were asked to pay few bucks for the lack of EU VAT handling by the seller, declined and Pine had to foot the bill(we're literally talking about $5 bucks), and so and so on. Eventually I decided I'm 50% convinced they do it on purpose to "help" their EU store, and the other 50% is they simply don't care enough. They just cover the biggest markets and population centers, like shipping to Germany in EU was still available for 12EUR last time I checked. So, no, I'm not buying their risc V board. Id rather get Sipeed's board that I can pay $11 for, but get it shipped for few bucks from China. The whole design is open too.