After a somewhat shocking and, frankly, indefensible 10-month hiatus, Posti.fi has finally got their act together and reinstated commercial mail services to the United States.
It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with this bewildering organisation that during the interruption Posti appear to have put great thought in to how they can extricate even more money from Finnish merchants and their American customers. So, not content with already being the most expensive-to-use national mail-carrier in the world, they have raised their product prices to even greater heights.
It now costs, therefore, a staggering €55 - including their new "handling fee" - to send a standard-sized hardcover book from Finland to the U.S.
If they had set out to deliberately discourage and prevent customers outside of Europe from having access to the inventory of Finnish sellers then they could not have done a better job, Congratulations!
It is now the case that Posti's prices for a single-product package to the USA exceed those of some private couriers, most of whom offer lightning-fast delivery times compared to Posti's pedestrian 8-14 working days.
Unfortunately, many Finnish traders will be throwing their arms up in the air and exclaiming - what can you do! Well I am not one of those.
Every order from outside of Europe which we receive will be - in the first instance - referred to a private courier for a shipping quote. If the courier can beat the Posti price they are going to get our business and the saving passed on to the customer,
I am aware that some private couriers have poor reputations but in the last ten months we have been using them frequently for US customers without any problems at all.
As a visitor to the site and potential customer for our books and products, do not allow this rant to discourage you, however. Even Posti has its good point and that would be that Posti's parcel prices are based upon the dimensions of the parcel and not so much upon weight.
If you were to order 4 standard-sized books from us, for example, these would fit comfortably in the package that costs €55, as long as the combined weight is less than 10 kilos. 3 books would be travelling for free. That is actually a very generous weight allowance,
Similarly, if the book or product weighs less than 500g when packed, the price of the shipment to the US drops to €42 and the shipping time improves to 2-8 days. It's all a bit baffling but it's true.
It will always pay to drop us a line about anything which you are interested in buying, to discuss your options for shipping to the US - or any other country outside of Europe.
Look forward to hearing from you!
Sean