Over the last month, we’ve seen a significant increase in shipments held by US customs. This is distressing because it impacts our customers and puts a significant strain on our business. Our policy is to resend any returned parcels. While we reserve the right to charge for additional shipping, we don’t. The reship is free, and with margins being as thin as they are after all the recent price cuts, this means we lose money whenever a shipment is returned and reshipped. Of course, all our customers rightly see are intolerable delays and plenty of frustration. This leads to an increased customer service workload and less time to spend on making things better. Everybody is losing. Something has to be done.
Here is the plan:
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We’re working with our shipping partners to get more information from US customs to establish what they’re objecting to. So far, it appears that the majority of the failures are due to a misunderstanding on their part regarding the need for us to have a US tobacco licence. We don’t need this license because it only applies to US companies selling tobacco in the US. We have approval to import tobacco, but the nuance is lost on the average customs official. To resolve this, we will be including a copy of our letter of approval with our shipment documentation to see if that stops this merry-go-round of stoppages, requests for license, and returns.
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We have gone through all 1,000 of our products to ensure that they all have the correct HS Code and customs description. An HS Code is a number that identifies the product to customs. We have identified a few products where the HS code was incorrect and fixed them. We have subdivided our products and provided more accurate HS codes where appropriate. In short, we have sharpened up our act so that all the information we provide to customs is as perfect as it can be.
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Finally, in response to the feeling of helplessness we suffer when shipments are returned without explanation, we have decided to run a series of experiments. Inspired by my background in software, we’re going to systematically investigate what’s triggering these customs holds. We are going to batch up our parcels so that shipments will either contain pure snuff orders, snuff + nicotine pouches, and snuff + tobacco pouches. We will see which shipments get stopped. In effect, we are sending probes into the US customs system to see what they object to. We’ll use the results to refine our approach and further investigate. We are not powerless. We don’t need to sit passively waiting for customs to not tell us if we are doing something wrong, we can discover, via these crafted shipments, what it is they are rejecting.
There has been a lot of chatter online about red lists and US customs rule changes. I reserve judgment until the results are in. Until then, I want you to know that we are doing our very best to get the product into your hands. I share your frustration, I see how it impacts our bottom line to send and resend, and resend again, shipments. I am as motivated as you are to sort this problem out.
The good news is, I still believe that nothing fundamental has changed. They may be enforcing the rules more effectively than before, but the rules remain the same. Our mission is to establish those rules by proxy, but with careful crafting of our shipments, I think we can do it.
Nobody said this was going to be easy. All I ask is your patience, and confidence that we will find a solution together.
Thank you.