Hi avault1810,
But I am not sure your us shipping company is a good catch.. 1st, 50% promotion is till 31 May. Take note that discount is a bonus and is not a GIVEN. Company can cut off at any point.
For me, I prefer to look at facts and figures. And if you compare your recommendation myus.com, this is the one I would be fainted by the price.
Based on a 5 kg parcel calculation, here are the shipping cost comparison
(in order of cost)
GShipExpress - USD$34.84
Comgateway - USD$41.05
Vpost - SGD$58.90 (USD$43.62)
MyUSA - USD$80.97 (2.32x more costly than gship, way off scale)
Even myusa with 50% discount is only at USD$40 odd, which got to remain forever in order to use it. If one fine day, the promotion terminates, guess I will be stuck with shipment that need to pay EXTREMELY HIGH cost.
Big NO NO for me.
So I signed up for Gshipexpress and MyUS to do some comparisons. I find both companies have different advantages that depends on your needs.
Note: I haven’t physically sent anything back yet but I am planning to try both out. I’ve already sent my first order to Gship yesterday.
This means I can only compare based on the prices and what information I can find on their website - nothing relating to shipping times / professionalism etc.
My Research:
Gshipexpress
If you should only have a small number of packages, then Gship is a great option.
Holding period is 30 days without charge, and the charges are cheap.
One issue is that if you have more than three packages then they charge $4USD for each subsequent package.
They will repack each box so long as the difference is one KG - this I think is pretty good.
Address is in Oregon which means no sales tax - also good
I also found their website to be a bit amateurish with mistakes in spelling / punctuation. But this is a minor issue. Also it seems they don’t have many members - in Singapore it appears they have less than 700 users, so I hope they know what they are doing.
For
MyUS - it is 50% off now until May 31, after which it will be 30% off two years from your date of enrollment (via the AMEX link) -
If the 50% discounts are extended it would be good to use them if you will have many packages and the weight would cross 10KG, plus many of your items actually comprise of more volumetric weight.
Holding period is also 30 days, but the best part is that do not charge for volumetric weight.
From what I understand how they do this that they repack every single item that they can into lesser number of boxes (or 1 if they can) - it makes sense but for some it may not be so nice to have every single item repacked into another box.
Address is in Florida which has about 6% sales tax for online stores that have operations / outlets / offices in Florida.
They appear to be a huge company with 300K members.
One other benefit is that they offer multiple shipping companies.
E.g FedEX, DHL, UPS etc.
This gives you more options and better pricing choices. At different weight steps somethings DHL is cheaper and at others FedEx is cheaper.
But at the 11KG weight (remember they don’t count volumetric), Fedex is $114USD before discounts. Even with 30% off it is a good value if you have bulky items.
Vpost - they won’t really open your packages unless it is 3KG or more. So if you really prefer not to have your items opened then Vpost has its benefits in this way.
Also you declare the value of each item, and the threshold of $400 is charged per package and not per shipment.
Comgateway - I swore never to touch them again after a major fiasco years ago where my packages took 3 - 4 months before they found it and they had no idea where they were.
Borderlinx - Gave up when years ago when they jacked up prices overnight without notice, never used them since
Basically I have just shipped back my last shipment from Vpost and will be moving on to Gship and MyUS - depending on whether MyUS extends a better discount. 30% may still be good if you are sending bulking items and have many packages.
My most recent shipment from Vpost has 15 packages. I paid over 8KG excess in volumetric weight. But I had some packages I needed in original box unopened.
TLR -
Recommendation based solely on pricing:
Few Packages, lightweight - GshipExpress
Many packages, bulky but light items, total weight around 10kg - MyUS (via Amex signup)
Vpost - try not to use unless you really don’t want people opening your packages as much as possible