Buying Chinese Books Online and Shipping to the US

[gato]

If the listed delivery address is in France, then it should be fine.

[edelweis]

Thanks Gato, the address contains 法国 repeated twice (not sure why - I merely selected it from the drop down list).

And the graphic thing explicitly says I need to wait for 4 to 8 weeks, so they did register it as a foreign address.

I'm sill feeling terribly deprived: obsessively checking where my parcel was last scanned - at least until it gets on the ship - should be part of the "wait for parcel from China" experience IMHO

I'll just have to bug Roddy about tracking his own parcel now

[imron]

should be part of the "wait for parcel from China" experience IMHO

We have a whole thread dedicated to it

[edelweis]

Good news: a traking number appeared today on the Dangdang order page (yes, I have been checking everyday.)

Bad news: http://intmail.183.com.cn says "Error 500--Internal Server Error" when I try to track the package.

Which reminds me of the http status cats.

[Shei]

I received a book from Dangdang today. It took two months and one week. As usual the package looked as though it had been run over by a bus, but the book inside looked pretty fine, just one little dent.

[gato]

Yeah, that run-over-by-a-bus look is common with deliveries within China, too.

[roddy]

Turned up this morning. Ordered on Feb 22, so that's nine or ten weeks. Bit slower than they said, but never mind. I got the impression from the various tags and labels that it might have sat on the docks in Shanghai for a while waiting for the boat, will try and reconstruct its journey later perhaps.

Best news of all is that I'm now the proud owner of a large 中国邮政 sack. Yay!

[edelweis]

Congratulations shei and roddy

The tracking website has stopped giving me an error, but still no information about my pagkage's whereabouts...

[roddy]

Anyway, as far as I can tell, my parcel left Dangdang March 2nd ( I orderd Feb 23rd), left China Post's custody on March 11, was given a transit tag with 'planned departure date' of 25th April, but assuming it did end up coming by boat must have left earlier than that, as it arrived with me May 3, and I'm fairly sure boats don't go that fast. Dangdang appear to have paid 140 yuan for shipping, which is odd as I only gave them 87 yuan. Not sure what the story is there.

There's a mobile phone number for someone at Dangdang on it as well. That might come in handy. I suspect I might be able to sell it to edelweis in a couple of months....

The tracking page is now giving me:

出口总包直封封发 英国 上海国际 2012-03-11

But I'm sure that's only appeared recently.

[edelweis]

Interesting... the price discrepancy is odd indeed, unless you ordered something very heavy (I'd think 水浒传 is heavy...).

That phone number wouldn't be of any use to me unless the person speaks French

Today the tracking for my package works at last:

状态 : 收寄局收寄

邮件寄达国 : 法国

状态发生日期 : 2012-05-04

Edit (May 7, June 21)

the tracking website seems to work only at random hours. This weekend and this Monday morning it didn't work at all, but now (Monday evening) it works again.

I doubt anyone is interested, just recording it here for myself:

到达投递局 法国 2012-06-21

到达进口互换局 法国 2012-06-20

出口总包直封封发 上海国际 2012-05-06 (has left the Shanghai outward office of exchange)

出口总包互封开拆 上海国际 2012-05-06 (was sorted at the Shanghai transit office of exchange)

出口总包互封封发 济南国际 2012-05-05 (has left the Jinan transit office of exchange)

出口总包互封开拆 济南国际 2012-05-05 (was sorted at the Jinan transit office of exchange)

收寄局收寄 2012-05-04

[imron]

Best news of all is that I'm now the proud owner of a large 中国邮政 sack. Yay!

Now you'll have something to put all your luggage and belongings in next time you want to catch a train.

[edelweis]

the package arrived today. Don't let the "inside" photo mislead you, they only put bubble wrap on the top. The bottom book and the sides of the books were unprotected and the books were free to move about. The books are a little bent in the corners but the CD which accompanies one of them does not appear to be broken.

[hihi678]

Hi edelweis,

Just 5 minutes ago, I placed an order on dangdang and paid for it with my mastercard (I'm based in Australia), my order total was under 500RMB, and after entering the confirmation code that I received via sms into the space provided on the website, it led me to a page with the 'Approved' message for a few seconds before directing me to another page with a payment failed/unreceived page: '您的支付遇到问题！请查看您的银行交易记录 etc....'. I haven't received any confirmation email from dangdang.

I found your post via google and you seemed to have experienced the same thing as well. It usually take a couple of days for my transactions to appear on the Mastercard online transaction history record, so I'm unable to check whether my payment actually went through or not.

In your case, did the payment actually go through when you got the 'approved' and then error message? I'm tempted to try make the payment again but I'm afraid it'll cause a duplicate payment.

Thank you for your time.

[edelweis]

@hihi

sorry, I missed your message.

If the page that displayed the error belongs to the credit card proxy company, probably the payment did not go through. But if the error page belongs to dangdang, in my experience it means the payment did go through and you will probably receive a confirmation email from dangdang the next day.

In any case I advise anyone in the same situation not to hurry to try and pay again for the same order! What's a few more days of waiting when you're looking at 8+ weeks of shipping?

Wait at least two days, the worst that can happen is that your order will get cancelled automatically by dangdang due to lack of payment. ( then you have to rebuild your order from scratch but that's a minor hassle compared to trying to get a refund for a double payment...)

[edelweis]

2nd order arrived today. Ordered on 5 August. That's 9 weeks I think.

There was no bubble wrap at all, just the cardboard box.

3 of these books had CDs, one is cracked, all are bent .

My computer can't read even the least bent CD... it just makes ugly noises and nothing else happens.

Ah well. I'll scour the internet for a way to salvage those CDs tomorrow. Today is Calligraphy Day.

[Alec]

Anyone know any store can buy 金克木集? Very hard to find a store to buy in USA and can have the books ship over from China

[Polyhistor]

Years later, perhaps my experience will be instructive. 

 

I order from JD.com. So far I've spent several grand on books from China and have had zero issues. They ship within a week and arrive at my Canadian doorstep after another 5-8 days. Shipping adds about the cost of each book on, but the more you buy, the bigger a discount you get. Play around in your cart and check the shipping prices and you'll sometimes find you can save a few bucks by adding an extra book to get an even bigger discount than that book's cost. 

 

I have had one slight thing to complain about. I bought from a store on JD without realizing it on my first or second order and ended up being charged extra shipping like a week later. But that's only happened once out of maybe a dozen orders.