Restarting shipping to the US is taking much longer than expected, we're really sorry about this! We're hoping to get this up and running again before the end of the month but we can't guarantee it. Below is the reason, for those who want to know the "technical" bits.

The delay is caused by system limitation - it turns out that if we activate tariff collection for US, then we must activate it for the EU as well. Right now for the EU, we collect VAT for orders under €150 under the IOSS (Import One-Stop Shop) system. The VAT we collect is handed to a centralised system which then distributes it to the various EU countries.

For orders above that €150 limit, right now the VAT is not collected, and the customer pays for it to their authorities when they receive their packages. If we also collect VAT for orders over €150 (by activating tariff collection for the US and therefore also the EU), then a different system kicks in. We would collect the VAT, but this would not be given to the IOSS system. Instead, we need to find delivery companies that would send the packages, do the customs clearance and pay the VAT, and then bill us that amount. This is known as PDDP (Postal Delivered Duties Paid).

There is a limited amount of delivery options for doing this. Royal Mail currently does it for a small number of countries, and the service costs £0.50 surcharge which we are ready to absorb. For other countries we can use Parcelforce, but because they're primarily for heavy packages, they have fixed rates which are much higher and there is a €5 service fee for each package.

So we might get scenarios such as shipping 10 lace sections to Finland, which Royal Mail does not have PDDP for:

Postage (Parcelforce PDDP) ~£29

Service Charge (€5) ~£4.35

Shipping Total ~£33.35

That is really not a reasonable shipping price for a very small and light package to from UK to EU!

It is possible for us to split the order into two packages, but IOSS postage labels would be automatically generated, while the system doesn't recognise it as an IOSS order, and that can get us into trouble. This means additional shipping rules need to be set, on top of setting up each country to use either Royal Mail or Parcelforce depending on order value.

There are some other delivery services which would hold the package and contact the customer for customs clearance payment, but their fees are also quite high and we don't feel like that is good value since the customer would have to do an additional step, get their credit card out etc which is an annoyance in itself. It also just looks fraudulent so the customer might refuse to pay and the package would get bounced back.

Right now we're trying all sorts of configurations to work out the best value for money and has the least complicated shipping shenanigans. We're hoping to have it sussed out soon, and if we can change our contract with Parcelforce to one with weight bands rather than fixed price per country, even better.

In short, we're working on it!