We are starting a slow roll out to move towards using UPS International Shipping instead of the United States postal service international shipping. Yes, we are aware that it is more expensive, but we are doing this for a few reasons:
Due to the large number of international orders that get lost - we lose money and you never receive your purchases
A significant amount of orders clear customs in the US and the destination countries, but then get returned to us for a variety of reasons such as being marked unclaimed, customers refusing to pay import taxes, and other reasons unknown to us. We have received things returned by post several months after they were initially shipped out.
Delivery times are unreliable - sometimes they arrive in a couple weeks and others they take 1-2 months to arrive or sit in the United States export facility for extended periods of time.
Lastly, starting May 1st, the USPS is putting a slow down on all non priority shipping so that is going to cause even more lag time in transit.
We hope that by moving to UPS International that we can resolve many of these issues for our customers. However, there are two things to keep in mind since we sell on our own website in addition to Etsy, and a few other places.
For our website customers: We are working to add the UPS international shipping costs manually because there is no integration with Squarespace though our third-party shipping software does the cost by weight and location seamlessly.
For our Etsy customers, there is no way as of yet to integrate UPS international shipping so the forced option is for USPS shipping. We can offer an upgrade in the cost to ship via UPS and the difference can be sent to our PayPal account at belladonnasbotanicals@gmail.com. However, if you choose to use the cheaper USPS international shipping option, we will no longer be offering refunds for lost, delayed, or returned parcels. This is our policy.
We want you to receive the products you paid for in a timely manner without them getting lost, damaged, delayed, or returned to us for various reasons. At this point, we have issues with about 50% of our international orders, which is what has necessitated this change in international shipping policies and carriers.
See the rest of our store policies here: https://www.belladonnasbotanicals.com/store-policies-shipping-returns-refunds-international-orders