Hi all,
I figured I should weigh in at some point in here, but I'm not really sure what to say since this seems to be beyond our control, so I've refrained. We get it out the door really fast. 99% are within a few hours. I checked in on the guys in shipping yesterday and at 4:50pm when UPS made their second pickup for the day, they were shipping Smokingpipes.com orders that had come in at 4:25pm (and yesterday was one of the busiest shipping days we've ever had).
So, it sounds like the problems are specific to Canada. If the original poster's order was placed the 26th, it would have shipped the 26th or 28th (the 27th being a Sunday). The part I don't get is how it took ten-plus days to get from us through Canadian customs. And it seems like there is a bit of a pattern here (among Canadians, at least), so we can't chalk it up to weird one-off customs gremlins. And then I really don't know how it can take--presumably using the same shipping services--so much longer once in Canada.
So, I have one suggestion:
The Super Saver International shipping option we offer is a little bit cheaper. In theory, it should take one more day because it's routed differently. But, because it's routed differently (it gets sorted by UPS in NY, then handed to USPS there), it might actually prove a lot faster for Canadian customers encountering time-in-transit problems. This is a relatively new service for us, so we don't have a ton of real world feedback yet. In this very specific case, the cheaper option might actually be faster if this is a consistent routing issue and if the problem has to do with routing in Columbia, SC or another regional USPS hub.
Sykes
