UK is scheduled to leave EU on Friday, 29 March 2019
International shipping... arrival... receiving the much expected mail... don't know how to call this
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It’s also because CE is a self certification system. You claim you have all the required safety testing done and, if you haven’t, you pray no one comes knocking with a law suit. There is not central body giving out CE certs. You just stick the mark on once you’ve made sure you adhere to the relevant European STDs.
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My take, for what it’s worth, is that as an international buyer I’ll have to pay to ship it back if something goes wrong. So I want them to be damn sure everything is next to perfect before it heads my direction. If that means waiting an extra 2 months then honestly it’s worth it as it’ll probably save me money. I’d rather they didn’t rush the last mile because if it arrives with a massive hole in the side I’ll be… A touch miffed shall we say.
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Yes but you are required to create a technical file of evidence of why you pass the standards and the person who signs the declaration of conformity is legally responsible if anything goes wrong. And I think that person has to be a European citizen.
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Is this the correct term? I have only ever heard STD used in a different context 
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It would seem that is still the case, per the latest update:
Yea after rereading the announcement i saw i skipped paragraph informing about it and jumped the gun. Reading off mobile small text chunks does that to me so it’s my fault for missing the text.
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Having had to tackle this issue for professionally shipping something as benign as skeins of knitting yarn, and seriously struggled with some of the logistics and regulations of international shipping, I really feel for the GF team - they have had 2 years to figure out how to handle the whole design, mass production, packaging, software and shipping processes, not to mention just getting a company to function. Shipping a complex, regulated piece of precision equipment worldwide is a nightmare I wouldn’t even want to attempt. Hell, it’s taken me half a day just to work out a vague idea of the customs taxes I would have to pay for just one country (and I speak the language). Maybe they should indeed have not made international backing available, but I can only imagine the whining that would have ensued, similar to the complaints they’re getting now about shipping delays. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
As I see it, anyone ordering internationally knows shipping is going to be expensive (and taxed) and take longer, even with an established company. Anyone ordering a complex high tech item from a crowdfunding campaign should expect delays and a process that isn’t perfectly smooth. If you don’t know that, then you shouldn’t be let loose on the interwebs with a credit card 
Either way, I ordered on the last day of the crowdfunding campaign, so international or not, I knew I was coming last! 
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there’s wouldn’t have been any of that whining because they made the boards buyer only after the pre-orders started :V
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That would be fine were we not originally told that production and shipping was only 6 months away.
Still, to further your analogy.
When you were trying to organise shipping & customs for your skeins of yarn… had you given Clients anticipated delivery dates BEFORE you had started production? Whilst you were still experimenting with what/how you wanted your yarn to be? With what it could and couldn’t do?
Did you offer International Clients a chance to buy the yarn and thus give anticipated delivery dates BEFORE you had actually put international shipping processes in place?
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Actually, that was exactly the situation that I was hired to deal with. International shipping was already being offered and there was no plan, no international customer service (I mean why bother to have any English-speaking customer service employees when you’re planning to ship massively to the US and UK?), and no deals set up to ship abroad other than going through manual postal shipping at retail prices for each parcel. In a perfect world, that would never have happened. In a perfect world, the flawed human decisions that led to that would never have been made. But the world is not perfect.
I’m sorry if my (admittedly lame) attempt at humor came across as flippant or critical, but the essence of my message was that I wish more people who order online would realize that there are humans behind the pixels. Whether you order from a single artisan, a small company or a giant like Amazon, there are humans involved, not only in fulfilling that specific order but in making it possible for you to order that product in the first place. That means months or even years of hard work before you even hear about the product, and it also means that sometimes, errors are made, sometimes things are overlooked, sometimes unpredicted things come up that delay the rest, even with all the hardest work and best laid plans - that’s life. That is even more the case when dealing with a crowdfunding campaign and a new company, new product and new everything.
I am as frustrated with the delays as any of you, and if @dan and his team hadn’t already openly addressed these issues (many times over for this particular one), I would be pissed off.
Right now, having read so many dismissive and in some cases disrespectful comments (in other threads) about how easy it is to ship internationally and how the team can’t be trying that hard, or even claiming that they are deliberately ripping us off, I can’t help but feel for them. Thinking back to some of the emails I would get about a delayed order for $100 of yarn, and how that made me feel for the customer, I can only imagine how frustrated and sorry they feel that they can’t get GFs to all of us who have invested so much cash and patience in this product. They have said so over and over. So I guess I just don’t get what more criticism is going to do to help at this stage.
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Oh, man… i feel for you…
Nothing like trying to patch a hole when the ship is already sinking.
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Im in australia and I’ve got mine (via private import through a forwarder) be very cautious with continuing to wait for your machine. And I mean this is a warning to all Australian customers, if your machine breaks expect some very heft costs involved with your warranty. My machine has suddenly stopped working after only 3 months…it literally worked one second on a 20 minute engraveing job and then poof…shes dead. They have outright refused to pay for the shipping of my current broken machine back to them or for the sending of a new machine to me. Just so you are aware it’s going to be about $2000 all up to send one of these back and get a new one sent to you if you are in Australia.
Wow! I’m guessing that’s AUD, yeah? So that’s ~$1,500 USD. That sounds absurd! Can you find a less-expensive shipper?!
Sadly I did a lot of shopping around and due to its large size and weight the machine isn’t cheap to send. Any international buyers better be vary wary of this. Unless they miraculously set up international warehouses worldwide which i doubt they have plans for anyone not in the US is gonna face some hefty fees. And also what’s to say the one they send out won’t break on me too. Their products are proving less reliable by the day if the problems and support section of the forumn is anything to go by. The models they send out for warranty replacement are all refurbished units that were sent in after something broke, what’s to say I don’t get sent a unit that’s had hundreds of hours of use and even though it past their “strict” quality control guidelines the unit they send me has a part that’s worn out and it breaks…what then? I have to spend another 2000 ?
I guess I’m not understanding. If GF shipped the machine to a (I’m guessing) US address and you had it forwarded through a private forwarder, is it right to expect GF to pay for shipping from Australia vs the country they sold the machine in? If you returned the machine to the original delivery location, would they cover shipping from that location to GF and back?
Plenty of people have either forward shipped or personally driven across the border to pick up from a US address, but all of them understood the risks of warranty coverage not covering shipping from where they took the machine, but having to get the machine back across the border again to get warranty service.
I completely understand that you’re frustrated and unhappy that your GF stopped working, but you had to understand this was a large risk you were taking with forward shipping to a country that GF does not yet ship to or cover warranty shipping to/from.
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Yes i understand that argument, but what happens when they start openly shipping to australia. The countries currently being shipped to outside of America still have to pay their return shipping so it seems even if I had waited for shipping to australia I’d be stuck in the same out of pocket expenses situation I am in now.
Not only this but in my case they will not accept returns from an address outside the USA nor will they send return items to an address outside the USA. What this means is that in order to get a new machine sent to you you are required to organise with a forwarding company to have your machine shipped to a warehouse owned by the forwarding company. Then you need to notify glowforge of the location of said warehouse and have them send a courier to pick up your broken machine. Once this has occurred they will send a new machine out but you have to have it send to the same warehouse of the forwarding company and then have the forwarding company send it to you. its such an ass about way of treating your loyal customers after they have waited so many years for their product to arrive.
How can they sell a product worth thousands of dollars that breaks so easily and then expect people to fork out so much in order to have a new one. This is less about my situation and more of a warning to those who might not be aware of it. There is a reoccurring issue popping up prolifically at the moment with glowforge machines simply ceasing to work for no apparent reason and I see this becoming a very large issue in the future. It’s not that big of a concern to glowgorge right now because most of their units are on the US mainland so it’s all too easy for them to just ship them back and send out a new one, I will not be alone on this topic.
Also I was not made aware of this return policy when I purchased one internationally, I understand it was fully “disclosed” in the fine print but how many people are not going to read that? How many people purchase something like this with the assumption/knowledge that most high tech instruments such as this normally come with a 2 year fully backed warranty.
feel free to chime in at any time mate.
I mean, honestly, your situation is kinda unique. You went outside of their supply/shipping chain to get your glowforge. You can’t expect them to do more than ship to the areas they already ship to. I foresaw the exact same problem with my Canadian order and chose not to get it shipped by a third party because the increased risk of me not being able to afford the costs to return are just too much.
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@rmurphy I just watched your video showing the startup with the machine homing into the right side…why are you starting the machine with the head centered along the X axis? Is that where it parks itself when it finishes a print?