Aim! Shoot!! Duck!!!

After using Borderlinx for over a year now, I guess it’s time to follow up on my previous post about it. So has my experience & recommendation changed since? Kind of. 

Now Borderlinx as a service is great & really gives people like me an opportunity to buy things from USA or UK where previously I would have not been able to. Unfortunately, Malaysian Customs & DHL makes it impossible for them to keep their promises.

Malaysian Customs needs no introduction. Any M’sian who have dealt with them knows they are incredibly inconsistent. Tax & duty is supposed to have been calculated by Borderlinx so Malaysian Customs should not be charging me again, but of course this rarely happens. I’ve only paid once, the rest of the time I managed to get off the hook after having a few chats with the Malaysian Customs supervisor in charge. The next issue I have with Malaysian Customs is their habit of ripping open my stuff for checking. Out of 10 times my stuff will get ‘inspected’ 8 times & often results in sealed packaging being opened even though the item is in clear view. This pisses me off the most as it’s hard enough to find Mint in Sealed Box items that I want, then having Malaysian Customs help me ‘officiate’ it is really heartbreaking. This also resulted in a few items I wanted to keep sealed being opened as well, completely ruining the value of the item.

Next is DHL. The issue? Their speed. It takes around 1 week or more to deliver my package from USA. This is not helped of course by Malaysian Customs holding my package as well. But what disappointed me the most is that DHL didn’t seem to have any urgency to get the package cleared from Malaysian Customs, instead opting to just wait for Malaysian Customs to get back to them. This has resulted in my package being stuck in Malaysian Customs for up to 3 days & if not for me calling DHL twice a day, it might have got stuck longer. Then of course I have to settle with Malaysian Customs so it drags on. So much for using courier service.

After running into these issues, I’ve decided to give USPS Postal service a try. USPS Priority International service is actually just slightly cheaper than using Borderlinx but it all depends on your package since USPS charges by weight while Borderlinx is by volumetric weight vs dead weight, whichever is larger. Overall I find it cheaper to use USPS Priority International when you have more than 2 items to send back at the same time. Surprisingly, it’s fast too! In fact it reaches in the same time period as using Borderlinx! An added bonus is that I have yet to have any of my packages ‘inspected’ by Malaysian Customs. * Touch Wood!!! * Overall a very good experience so far.

So does that mean I won’t use Borderlinx anymore? No, I’ll still use it as there are a lot of sellers on eBay that won’t ship internationally so for these cases I will still use Borderlinx. But of course it’s a second option now, first being to ship using USPS Priority International. Also, I try my best not to ship anything Mint in Sealed Box using Borderlinx now to avoid getting a heart attack when I receive the package.

I ran into Borderlinx on Citibank website one day, promoting the ability to do online shopping in USA by providing you with a local USA address to send your items to. This perked my interest to check it out as I thought this is a neat service to have. When I first checked it out sometime last year, it was still very new & the website didn’t have much info. Apart from creating an account, I didn’t bother to do much more. That was until one day I received an email notification from them regarding their new ‘Total Cost Calculator‘ tool in their website. This happened around the same time I started to check out BigBadToyStore. Call it a coincidence. I compared the shipping cost using their ‘Total Cost Calculator‘ tool with BigBadToyStore international shipping & it seemed at that time, Borderlinx didn’t cost a lot more, like maybe around RM40 to RM50 more when converted. Unfortunately, the ‘Total Cost Calculator‘ tool didn’t really make it clear how shipping cost is calculated nor did I have a clue as to why there was a section in the tool to enter the dimensions of the package. It’s like, how would I know how big the packaging would be? So I ignored it & proceeded to try out using Borderlinx. This is where the ‘nightmare’ begins.

Borderlinx Total Cost Calculator

Basically how Borderlinx works is that it provides you with a local USA address to send your stuff to. This is of great help when online shopping sites only ship to USA addresses & don’t do international shipping. Their service has since been updated to offer a UK local address as well to do online shopping in UK. So you pay for local shipping from the online merchant to Borderlinx, then ship it back when you are ready. Sounds great right? So I waited for my item to arrive in Borderlinx, and when it did & I checked the cost of shipping it back, I was floored. From just being an extra RM40 to RM50, the shipping cost is now a staggering RM100 extra. I instantly used their very useful online chat to find out more. Here I found out 2 things:

1) Volumetric weight vs Dead weight. Volumetric weight is the amount of space a package requires while Dead weight is the actual weight of the package. Shipping is charged based one whichever value is bigger. So if your box is big but it’s light, you’ll get charged for the space of the big box.

2) Items can only be kept in Borderlinx for 30 free of charge, after that, it’s shipped & your credit card automatically charged.

I have to say, I was shocked. Shocked because I knew, no matter what I’m stuck with Borderlinx & will have to pay that amount to ship it back, whether I liked it or not. Worse, I had to do it in 30 days max. During that time, these particulars weren’t clearly mentioned in the website & the support staff apologised for it. I even asked the support staff how could I know how big the package would be in the first place? He conceded that I wouldn’t be able to know. That’s OK, lesson learned, I thanked the support staff & waited as long as I could before I hit the ‘Ship It’ button.

The day finally came when I had to hit the ‘Ship It’ button. Luckily, the exchange rate for USD to RM went down so I saved a measly RM5 on shipping. So I clicked the ‘Ship It’ button, hoped to see my package arrive in a week time & be a happy guy. Too bad lady luck completely deserted me. A week after I shipped the item, I got a call from the local DHL office, informing me my package has arrived, BUT I needed to settle customs tax before I could  get my item. How much was I charged? Tax + administrative charges = RM100++. At this point, I’ll be honest, I was PISSED & really wanted to ‘kill’ someone/something.  I couldn’t believe my luck. But I decided,  I was going to find out how did they calculated the tax & get it reduced. After a few days talking to DHL & customs, it turns out it was calculated based on some odd shipping charge DHL was giving customs. After clarifying & providing proof of the shipping charge I paid to customs, DHL finally informed me my item has been released from customs FREE of tax! Wow! Thank heavens! Finally it’s settled, after a week being stuck in customs & DHL.

By now, you must be thinking, this is a damning review of Borderlinx & I would never use it again. It almost reached that point. But it didn’t because of the great support staff. I chatted with 3 different support staff & had email exchange with 2 more. They all answered my queries well, even though they couldn’t exactly give me a better solution, they at least helped by clarifying everything. I’ve noticed after my conversations with them, the website was updated with more detailed information, like for eg, clarifying volumetric weight & a detailed section about tax & duty. It’s even mentioned in the tax & duty section that tax & duty is now prepaid with shipment & your item SHOULD NOT be held in customs. I’ll hold them on that.

So would I use Borderlinx again? Maybe, because it can clear customs faster & will most likely arrive when compared to using international parcel. I got an email from the support staff thanking me for my feedback & rest assured that my feedback would be channeled to higher management so that the service will be improved. That email kind of made me feel, OK, at least my relentlessness paid off.

Having rekindled my Transformers interest, I find myself checking a couple of Transformers fan sites daily nowadays, checking on news of new figures, new happenings, conventions & stuff like that. It’s a very lively community, with yearly Botcon conventions organised by Transformers Collectors’ Club & Hasbro in the USA. There are BotCon organised elsewhere around the globe too like in Europe & Japan.

Two sites I check daily nowadays are Transformer World 2005 (TFW2005 in short) & Seibertron.com. TFW2005 is more of a forum while Seibertron is more of a news site. There’s a gallery section in Seibertron where you can check out tons of galleries of past & present Transformers figures. Browsing these 2 sites, I can’t help but notice a link to BigBadToyStore.com on both sites. So curiously, I went to check it out. Turns out it’s huge online toy store with an amazing variety of selection you can gawk at. They sell mint as well as 2nd hand toys in loose, opened or sealed form which is great as buying used toys is the only way to get some very hard to find figures, provided you can afford it of course. My focus was of course Transformers, in particular the Alternators section. As mentioned in my Transformers! Final Part post, Alternators are rare collectible figures now so I was wondering if I might be able to find 1 or 2 figures that I was looking for at reasonable prices. To my surprise, there were 2 figures, in good shape (one is sealed, one is opened but Back in Box condition) & price wise I can afford it. So I took the plunge, created an account, paid for it with my credit card & sat on the order for a while, wondering how I was going to ship it back here.

I had 2 options for shipping it back, use BigBadToyStore shipping by US Parcel or use Borderlinx, a shopping consolidation service by Citibank. Shipping it by US Parcel was cheaper but slower delivery (3 weeks) & most likely will get stuck in customs. Shipping it by Borderlinx was a little more expensive but faster delivery (5 days) & might slip through customs, depending on my luck. So I decided to use Borderlinx & try it out. I’ll blog about the Borderlinx experience seperately as it was not a very smooth one, unfortunately.

So finally, I got my package from BigBadToyStore, delivered via Borderlinx & here are some pictures to commemorate the ‘joyous’ occasion.

Overall I’m very happy with the packaging & how they sealed each box individually. I have no issues recommending BigBadToyStore to anyone, but please keep in mind, you’re shipping from USA so shipping cost is a bomb. Always try other cheaper alternatives in finding your rare figure, whenever possible. But if you can find an alternative method to ship it back, then shopping on BigBadToyStore is highly recommended, especially since they have clearance sales quite often.

UPDATE 21/04/2010: Talk about coincidence. BigBadToyStore is having a 15% sale on almost everything till this Friday, April 23, 2010!!! So go check it out.

Something I forgot to mention yesterday was BigBadToyStore has a ‘Pile of Loot’ shipping system. What this does is allow you to buy an item, store it in their warehouse for up to 6 months, all the while adding new items you wanna buy to the pile. A great way to consolidate stuff you want to buy & ship it in one go. I still have stuff sitting in my ‘pile’ over there now .