Navigating New Parts Delivery Waters

Allow us to go on a bit of a rant here, but has the service at UPS become absolute garbage in recent months or is it just our collective imaginations? We recently ordered a set of engine-mounting hardware for a Canadian Norton Atlas project bike through an eBay seller, only to have the items held up for over a month in US Customs. Eventually, we read a notice on the UPs website detailing that over $40 in duties were required to be paid before the $42 in parts could be delivered. Some four additional weeks later, we received not the anticipated parts order, but we managed to spot on the UPS website a short message explaining that the bolts would not be shipped to us after all. Instead, they were returned to the shipper due a vague reference to “service disruptions.” Why not call UPS directly, other CRM teammates suggested. But entering that special Ring of Hell entered us into an endless maze of AI-generated voice responses that simply repeated the “service disruption” message again and again. On about the fourth consecutive phone call to UPS – keep in mind their customer “service” phone contact number does not appear anywhere on their website- we were placed on hold for around 17 minutes. Eventually, we were connected with an overseas call center where we spoke with UPS contacts who’s heavily-accented English we could barely understand. From there we were transferred to UPS’ International Branch where, after another 22-minute hold, we were told the package is being returned to its shipper and the $40 paid by us in customs duties would not be returned and should be considered lost. This is not an incredibly large sum of money, but having lost out on not only the order but customs fees is a bit much. If any of you have experienced similar treatment while attempting to order motorcycle parts or accessories from overseas vendos, please share your experiences with the CRM team via rockersrule@caferacermag.com- we’d love to her about it.