[OT] Cheap postage

Syd Rumpo wrote

And its much harder to do now with our stamps that come on a sheet of backing paper that you peel them off from instead of licking the back of the stamp etc.

Anyone got a good way of getting those stamps off the original envelope so they can be reused ?

Google Usenet searches are awful. My message can be seen here although you can't really follow the thread:

I meant where did you see that spelt out from a reliable source ?

What's "a reliable source" in this context? :-)

As you will find if you do a quick search for 'AliExpress Escrow' there's loads of information about it all over the place. There's a few negative comments about AliExpress (as with any supplier) but in general people find the service works as described.

I've certainly bought a lot of stuff through them and have had very few problems. I had one item didn't arrive which was refunded and I had one set of faulty items but they were so cheap it wasn't worth doing anything about it (several other items from the same supplier were fine).

By 'a lot' I mean quite a few hundred pounds worth of many and varied sorts of things from cloth to electronics to brake discs.

Aliexpress themselves for example, particularly if they said that as part of their stock exchange listing etc.

Yeah, me too.

I did have one bluetooth neck band headset that never did work, didn?t even charge for long enough to work for more than a couple of minutes and never did pair with anything. They wanted it returned and weren't prepared to pay for the return and I obviously wasn?t going to pay for the return given that the cost of the cheapest return postage was rather more than I paid for the item.

They refused to extend the time during which the transaction could be disputed and just ignored me completely with no way to get aliexpress to do anything about that.

I haven't spent anything like that on aliexpress.

of many and varied

Mine has been as varied, but no car parts, mostly electronics, stuff like cutlery and bottle washing brushes etc.

Rape and a bit of shoplifting?

Amazon appears on my cc statement, so it looks as if they handle the financial side.

There are several countries where it costs less to send an airmail letter to the UK than it does to post the same letter within the UK.

For example, a letter weighing up to 20g can be sent airmail from Hong Kong for HK$3.70 (about 34p). The minimum cost of sending even a 2nd class letter in the UK is 54p, and for 1st class it's 63p.

In my experience, a letter sent from Hong Kong to the UK is normally delivered in about 3 to 5 days.

In fact it is spelt out very explicitly on the aliexpress web site.

So there could be a business model for UK letter deliver that ships the let ters in bulk from the UK to Hong King and then posts them back to the UK by airmail. It would make money and also break the UK post office monopoly on deliveries under £1.

Robert

I think that kind of service already exists. Doesn't TNT do something like that?

The anomaly isn't confined to the situation with Hong Kong v UK postal rates, a similar disparity occurs between many countries which is taken advantage of by bulk remailing services.