I am now tired of the international business.

[ThrillaMozilla]

Mike, your shipping costs are almost uniquely economical because you are willing to ship by mail. That is very much appreciated, considering that we're all refilling to save money. Unfortunately, mail to the U.S. can be unreasonably slow (like 3 weeks or something), but private shipping would be unreasonably expensive. I will always choose slow over expensive if I have the time. I think the border is the main problem, and there's nothing that can be done about that.

By the way, when you say you don't want to ship internationally, I hope you aren't excluding the U.S.

 

[CakeHole]

I hope he continues to ship internationally rather than let scammers stop a good service for the majority. Some of the suggestions i made would cut most of it out.

 

[Roy Sletcher]

I hope he continues to ship internationally rather than let scammers stop a good service for the majority. Some of the suggestions i made would cut most of it out.

I have to agree with Cakehole on this point.

I read his earlier suggestions and they made excellent sense. I am also guessing that the scams are all coming from the same geographic areas. Which is not the US, Canada or Western Europe.

Rather like Rita the Russian beauty who wants to be my sex slave for life if I send her a ticket to JFK and US$5,000. - Just getting that one off through Paypal. I will finance it with the proceeds from the crooked Nigerian Bank Manager who will ship me US$5 million as soon as I send him the $500 storage cost. He is so generous - Life is good,

Of course Mike will have to find his own best solutions, and they do exist.

If you read the comments about Paypal amongst the eBay and other vendors you get the sense that Paypal is more a problem thatn a solutin for small vendors. Read some of the horror stories from both sides at paypalsucks.com

I sympathize with his problems. Running a small business is hard unrelenting work.

RS

 

[Emulator]

Rather like Rita the Russian beauty who wants to be my sex slave for life if I send her a ticket to JFK and US$5,000. - Just getting that one off through Paypal.
RS

Lucky man!!!!! They are keen to get to Canada. I flew back from Toronto in 2005 and unfortunately came into contact with a west coast man who was on his way to Moscow or somewhere, to meet his new girl friend. He bent my ear for a couple of hours until he found someone else more receptive. I hate to think what happened to him!

Apologies for going off topic, it's your fault Roy!

 

[Smile]

I suggest to accept EU payment by bank transfer, as they are safer and cheaper option than paypal. (at least for me).

 

[Paul Verizzo]

Lucky man!!!!! They are keen to get to Canada. I flew back from Toronto in 2005 and unfortunately came into contact with a west coast man who was on his way to Moscow or somewhere, to meet his new girl friend. He bent my ear for a couple of hours until he found someone else more receptive. I hate to think what happened to him!

Apologies for going off topic, it's your fault Roy!

Actually, that guy might do quite well. There ARE plenty of third world women wanting that ticket to America or Canada and legal immigrant status. And the perception is - I don't want to start anything, but you know that at least the belief is true - that such women are less likely to be demanding or "uppity." And not just due to a sense of entrapment.

At least he didn't just send money.

So, how do I contact this Rita from Russia?

"We now return to regularly scheduled programming......."

 

[msmart]

Mike, I'm sorry to hear of your troubles. While I don't need ink now, I hope you'll consider selling to repeat customers (such as me).

 

[palombian]

Sad, I had no complaints about the last shipment to Belgium.
Took some time, but very low costs, and fresh ink labelled with an expiry date + 2 years.
Lucky I have stock.

This, and the falling EUR, obliges me to look for continental suppliers.

 

[mikling]

Thank You for the suggestions.

By international I principally mean outside of USA and Canada and UK has been good and no changes are forthcoming there. I am currently reviewing where I can ship with economical tracking.

Further very recent work on the magentas is indicating that the dye changed sometime in the late summer/fall of 2013. How do I know? Well, that is when I acquired my i1Pro2 spectro and I kept records and it is revealing that the dye changed. IS insists that according to them, they did not change the dye formulation. If that were to be true then that means that their supplier or somewhere in the supply chain the dye changed...

Here's something else. Sometimes an OEM carts fails but it is seldom. Well, I was battling with a newly flushed Canon CLI-8 this morning and never thought to think it was the cart..filled fine, looked fine but was not feeding properly into a newly acquired iP4500. Flushed head, soaked head etc....but the feed issue persisted. Till I looked at the underside of the cart. Trapped air bubble inside the slot under the sponge. Got rid of that and all was good again. Whew! That cost me hours. Don't take anything for granted.

Oh yeah, that newly acquired used iP4500 came with a bunch of new off shore compatibles. For the first test, I thought I would use new carts for the test, cracked them open and whaddaya know. 3 of the 5 new carts did not work properly. The PGI-5 refused to even print a nozzle test. YMMV.

 

[CakeHole]

Thank You for the suggestions.

By international I principally mean outside of USA and Canada and UK has been good and no changes are forthcoming there. I am currently reviewing where I can ship with economical tracking..

If shipping and payment from the UK has been fine for the most part in the past then if you stick to extreme Major Western Europe countries you will likely be fine (IE Spain, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria) I dont think i missed anyone? Stick to these and shipping costs etc should be similar to the UK, in fact a lot of UK courier operators also operate in a few of those countries (normally Spain, France and Germany in the main). SO tracking etc should be similar also.

Basically a simple way is look at a world map and draw as near as a straight line down from the middle of Denmark through Europe, anything on the Left should be pretty honest and shipping costs, insurance etc about the same as they cost to the UK, anything to the right of the line starts to become dubious (IE all the smaller countries and the Eastern Europe ones). Anything from Turkey and further East and you are asking to be screwed (again im sure there are plenty of honest decent people that live there, its just a shame theres a few that spoil it).

The Northern major bits of Europe (IE Norway, Sweden, Finland) are also normally pretty decent to deal with although shipping can cost more than major western EU. I sent something to Iceland once (although this was many years ago) and it cost a fortune, again though a decent country to deal with.