A few remarks on shipping
General:
Orgonise Africa is situated in Johannesburg, South Africa. We have a modern infrastructure and a well organised postal system.
Most of our orders come from Overseas, especially Europe and the Americas, some from Australia and NZ, but increasingly also from Asia and other African countries. It’s a worldwide business. And we are very happy for that.
Of course this means that for most of our customers we are quite far away and shipping will take longer than you are used to when you order from a business in your own country.
To be more precise: It either takes much longer or is much more expensive.
There is no way we can work around that, so its best to clearly understand what’s involved with an international order.
Also when passing international borders, customs or taxes may be levied.
All this is not a real problem, but has to be known before one makes a decision about the shipment method to use.
What company do we mostly use for shipping:
All shipment methods that we offer as Standard choices are based on the offerings of the South African Post office (and therey all other national post offices worldwide). This has the great advantage for us that we are only dealing with one agency. The post office is offering a universal service to all countries where a postal service exists at published rates. This made it possible for us to programme our website to automatically calculate shipping charges for each and every order, based on the published postal rates and the weight of the goods with an estimated factor for packaging.
Also customers who are contemplating an order can use this facility to calculate their shipping charges in advance.
All the weights of products put into the basket are automatically added up and the applicable rate based on the country yo are ordering from is looked up from a table.
This has cost us weeks to refine and works very accurately.
When we get asked “How much would it cost me to ship XYZ to Costa Rica or Malaysia” we do nothing else than simulate the order on our website, so there’s no reason why you couldn’t answer that question for yourself. (But of course we are willing to help if you are unfamiliar with online ordering procedures)
The principal methods we offer are:
EMS or “Expedited Mail Service”
This is the same as “Global Express” in the US, in most EU countries it seems to run under EMS as well.
EMS is an interesting hybrid between a courier service like UPS, FEDEX, DHL etc and a registered airmal parcel.
Most parcels that are shipped on a Monday reach their worldwide destination by Friday, often even by Thursday, although I don’t want to raise false hopes here, because exceptions confirm the rule as they say....
Yet the costs are significntly lower than with the large courier companies and so we have decided to offer this as our fastets option because of our good experiences with that service and the good price performance ratio. If you really want to save 48 hours on that, we have to arrange that seperately. Most people use EMS for smaller parcels like zapper orders or just a few special things, while going for slower but more economical options for the large items. We have however already shipped whole orgone howitzers or CBs with EMS.
Airmail
This is still reasonably fast but difficult to predict. Other than EMS, the parcels don’t get “expedited” through customs and that’s where they can sometimes be delayed.
Past experience is showing a wide range of transit periods from 5 to 28 days. Please understand that we cannot predict or guarantee how long an airmail parcel will take worldwide.
If there are delays, they are practically ALWAYS caused in the receiving country. I can track registered mail on the South African system (www.sapo.co.za) until it leaves the country and that’s never been longer than a few days (depending on shipment method).
Surface Mail
This is the good old grandma of all shipping methods and in most cases it means that a parcel will really travel by ship and hen onward by truck.
Sometimes luck will have it that they go “standby” via air when cargo space is available but most of it really goes by ship. Please understand that there’s practically no tracking, although we get numbers, but please don’t even try.
Sitting back and relaxing is the only way to enjoy surface mail shipping.
That’s why we advise our customers to expect anything between 6-12 weeks for a surface mail order.
A few have arrived faster, but again, I don’t want to raise false expectations!
Do not use surface mail if you don’t have time to wait for your order!
Insurance and guarantees
Insurance options are offered for some, but not all countries by the post office. Wherever they are avilable, we use them.
In all other cases we still guarantee that you get your order.
We have to do that when you pay by credit card and we also do that if you pay by bank transfer or any other means.
Please let us know when you have not received your order within the stipulated time frame (s.a.)
In those cases we will lodge an inquiry with the post office, which may sometimes expedite parcels that have become stuck in customs.
If this does not yield a result within a reasonable time (say 4 weeks), we will resend the order. These incidences are a very rare exception, not something that will likely occur when you place an order with us.
When do we ship
Most smaller items we have in stock all the time and they will be paced and shipped at the post office within 2-3 working days from receipt of payment. If you pay by credit card, payment is confirmed instantly. Inernationals transfers can take a few days to reflect on our account.
Larger items like CBs or Orgone Howitzers or very large orders of 100s of TBs etc. will often have to be made to order, especially when we have specials and get 20 orders fpr CBs in one week while normally shipping only 2-3 per week.. It can sometimes take 2 weeks or more to ship such items because their manufacture takes time and there’s no use dropping everything else and rush it.
Mostly these large itmes go by slow surface mail anyways, so the expectation will not be to receive them the next morning.
Generally we do what we can to get everything out as fast as we can, whereby we have to prioritise the fast shipping methods over the slow ones. (because someone who has ordered his goods by EMS has paid a lot of extra money to recieve his order very fast)
So if we have 3 EMS orders, 10 Airmail orders and 4 surface mail ordres, the EMS will be done immediately, then the airmail and then the surface mail. That’s only logical.
To put delays in perspective:
We have now been in business for almost 4 years and sent out way more than 1000 parcels worldwide.
Within this great number the following problems have occurred:
1 large parcel not claimed and returned, 1 parcel that was overweight by US standards (we did not know that at the time of sending) was partly emptied and arrived only in parts. We replaced the missing items and some extra gift to the customer.
1 parcel returned by customs in Italy with a hole drilled in one of the orgone pyramids.
In 2 cases herbal teas or supplements were rejected by German customs because they were falsely categorized as “medicine”, not the nutritional suplements that they are.
Some parcels delayed beyond the given time frame but arrived without loss or damage after a nerve wrecking wait. 6 or 7 incidences I am aware of, 2 pending at the moment unfortunately (May 2006).
1 EMS parcel to the UK completely lost. Customer got replacement of course.
Out of more than 1000 that is not too bad and should put everybody at rest. Nevertheless, when delays occur, this can be quite frustrating and that’s why we are constantly exploring alternative ways of delivery.
Freight Forwarding Companies
We are presently testing a method that is very interesting for large orders and maybe it’s availability will persuade you to place such a large order.
We are presently shipping 26 parcels to various customers in Germany by airfreight.
If the order is big enough and we can combine several consignments to the same country, that can be cheaper than surface mail.
This will also depend on the country. For Germany and neighbouring countries we can now confidently say that this option becomes very interesting for anything more than 30kg . (That could be 2 CB bases and some hundred TBs or whatever is bulky and heavy)
The advantage is that we have full control over the whereabouts of the consignment and it’s generally much faster than surface mail.
Delivery is by truck to your door, or (much cheaper) you fetch it from the airport.
Also it can be arranged that all taxes or customs duties are already sorted out when you get your parcel.
Even Sea freight can be an option for large orders because there is still an advantage in speed and better control and tracking and the customs handling option is the same.
All these options can only be individually arranged and it must be understood that we can only use individually arranged shipping solutions like this for large orders.
So why order from us?
I have just taken a look arund and found confirmed what I had hoped to find: Our offers are very attractive in price and quality. We seem to have the most complete range of orgone tools, zappers and related products that you can get at any one source worldwide.
And we have a name and reputation because we have been around pretty much since the fantastic story of orgonite began..
Last but not least you may want to consider that your support for our business enables us to expand our orgone work in Africa that has already brought such enourmous benefits to the region we were able to reach so far.
Orgonised greetings
Friederike and Georg Ritschl