Shipping Cart Recent Experience - Summary

[OnMyWay]

I had used Shipping Cart pre-Covid and did not have any issues.  Pre-Covid the cheaper ocean mode was fine and would take 1-2 months to arrive.  Now, ocean shipping of all types is still a mess, so I used the more expensive air cargo mode.  And, some of the items, mainly clothes, I did need rather urgently.

The air cargo worked very well.  I don't find the cost too bad, especially for smaller items that don't weigh a lot.  I bought a lot of clothes and those are fairly cost effective for air cargo.  The Air Cargo mode is $6.99 a pound rounded to the next highest pound, +$12 flat fee per shipment.

Value was the main thing I tried to watch and group my Amazon shipments for shipping on Shipping Cart.  Philippines Customs technically allows shipments less that p10,000 to pass thru without duties and taxes.  At the time, over the past few months, that equated to $170-180.  Four of my shipments were in that range.  On the 5th shipment, I deliberately made the value $250 to test the limits.  No issues at all.  I suspect LBC has a "deal" with customs.  Don't count on that.  Now that the peso has fallen further, the p10000 is only about $175.  Also, don't ship more than one shipment on the same day.  Customs may group the values to be more than p10k.   Space them out at least 2 days.

The transit time was excellent.  They promise about 2 weeks for air cargo.  Four of the shipments arrived in 7 calendar days and one arrived in 4 days.

The bad stuff:

They lost one of my Amazon shipments after it arrived at their warehouse.  There appears to be only 2 customer service agents.  One appears to have an IQ of about 50.  For comedy purposes, I should make a post of our exchanges.  They finally honored my claim of $37.71, but then finance paid me $31.17.  I'm still bickering with then about the last $6.

Would I use them again?  Yes, unless a better alternative comes up.