DHL – Seite 3 – YiffyToys – Behind the scenes

2020-09-082023-01-31

DHL – changes in USA shipping

Due to the SARS-SoV2 most international flights are cancelled.
Up to now this ment long waiting times for a plane to carry parcels along and a small surcharge to all parcels headed for the US.

Starting 15th of September that surcharge will be lifted (and we will reduce our prices accordingly) but a lot of parcels will travel by sea. So the waiting time for a flight will be replaced by the travel time of a cargo ship slow steaming across the Atlantic.
DHL says this means 25-30 days of travel time for parcels.

Premium parcels are still flown (and still have the surcharge in addition to the already high price tag) but due to the weight of our products, we do not offer that service.

2020-08-132023-01-31

DHL shipping to NL fixed

A while ago we automated our shipping fee calculation due to all of DHLs Corona-fees for different countries. It seems while doing so we have forgotten the Netherlands in the big table of country codes.
So for NL (but not the Netherland Antilles) only „pickup at converntion“ would show up and no „DHL shipping“.

This has been brought to our attention this morning and we have just been able to fix it.

We are also asking DHL for clarification on what Corona-fees for different countries are still in effect as there have been a large number of changes we have to incorportate for different countries and DHL’s updates are purely incremental.

2019-12-192023-01-31

No new DHL prices

DHL in Germany currently is in the news because DHL will increase prices for end customers starting on the 1st of January.

However, for business customers that already happend at the 1st of September this year.
So we will not increase our shipping prices with the new year.

2019-06-292023-01-31

DHL issues

We updated our shop software in the (misguided) hope that an email bugfix contained in the update would fix our contact form.
(It didn’t.)

Right after the update we got strange „host unrechable“ errors when trying to automatically purchase DHL postage. It does happen that their servers are out of order. Especially in the middle of the night or on weekende.
So we just waited and yes, the next day this error was gone.

But now we are getting errors downloading the WSDL file for the DHL SOAP service. The problem is… in a web browser and on the command line we can download that WSDL file just fine. We also did not change any PHP settings. Especially regarding network permissions.
All debug logging, poking around and testing stuff didn’t give us any clues whatsoever.

So for the time being are are required to copy&paste every single delivery address to the manual DHL business customer website and purchase each label separately. Then enter the tracking details in the shop and print everything. All automation that enables us to handle the daily workload is gone.

2019-01-042023-01-31