Overall International Shipping Update

Tim here with an update on international fulfillment.

Please note that this does NOT affect domestic, USA orders.

International fulfillment has resumed.

If you still have an unfulfilled international order, your order is still here, it’s still being fulfilled, and we’re reaffirming that you will not be charged any additional shipping, duties, tariffs, or other fees beyond what you already paid.

I also want to explain what actually happened, as we’re finally able to talk about it.

In our last update about international fulfillment, we told you that we were having problems with our international shipping partner, and that we were both pushing them to get the orders moving and looking at other shipping options.

Unfortunately, that situation did not resolve the way we had hoped.

We had contracted this shipping partner specifically because their system was supposed to calculate the full international cost at checkout, including shipping, duties, tariffs, and fees, so that what you paid when you ordered was what you paid, with no surprise bill when the package reached your country.

However, as we started digging through the orders, we found that their system had badly undercharged a number of them, including some where it had collected little or nothing for international shipping and duties at all.

The shipping partner later confirmed that there had been a bug in their system.

In the sample of orders we audited, the actual amounts the shipping partner billed us were roughly 148.7% higher than the amounts their system had calculated when the customers placed their orders. In some cases, the difference was 300%+.

At the beginning, we worked with them in good faith, and we spent many months pulling apart the orders, invoices, shipping costs, and customs charges, sometimes one order at a time, trying to reconcile the mess with them.

And, during this, we also tried to get packages out. However, their system broke on us, barring us from being able to ship the orders.

This happened repeatedly. We were promised a fix, or they promised to get us data for reconciliation, and time and time again, they would come back weeks later with the claim that it was “too heavy a lift” to get the data from the database, and every time, we went to try and do as much as we could ourselves, through our own labor, as we continued to try working with them in hopes of a resolution.

From the incomplete records we were able to reconstruct, we identified $30,361.88 in charge discrepancies between the invoices we’d been given and other data sources. If the same pattern continued across the remaining international orders, we estimated approximately $121,788 in additional costs.

Our primary goal, the entire time, was to be able to ship the packages, and so every time, we reached out and tried to work with them to solve the problem mutually and amicably.

However, many months into this, we were finally able to meet with the shipping partner’s CFO. The first meeting was simple, where we exchanged information, and they requested another reconciliation sheet, one that we spent another few weeks constructing. Then, their CFO sent another request for a meeting to discuss their suggested solution. Four days later, the shipping partner’s outside counsel sent us their final answer.

They said they would no longer ship the outstanding packages, they were terminating our contract, and they asked us to sign an NDA that would have prevented us from talking about the situation.

But we owe you the reasons behind why it’s been taking so long. We refused to sign it.

When we asked them why they’d suddenly changed, they stated that they were not the right business partners, told us to find another shipping provider, and wrote to us that the solution to the charge discrepancies was to send the packages anyway, and let the customers deal with surprise duties and fees upon delivery.

We refused.

We will not make our customers pay those additional costs.

Now the contract has been terminated, and with this shipping partner no longer shipping the outstanding orders, we had to rebuild our international shipping process without them.

That process is now running, and international orders are moving again.

Unfortunately, that means substantially more customs paperwork, and much more manual work to get these packages through different countries. It also means that the negotiated shipping rates that were being paid are no longer what we’re paying, and we’ll have to pay an increased cost on shipping, on top of the duties and fees.

We will not charge any international customer extra for it. We will be covering it.

The new process will not move as quickly as our normal fulfillment process because of that extra work, but it is moving, and the remaining international orders will be going out through it.

We know you’ve been more than patient, and we are deeply grateful for your kindness.

If you would rather have your money refunded, we would also be happy to process that for you as well.

As your order reaches the shipping queue, we'll email you to confirm your current shipping address before it leaves. You don’t need to do anything right now, just keep an eye out for that email.

-Tim, Founder Vite