COVID-19 update – UPS and DHL stop serving some Red Zones in some countries

The COVID-19 pandemic is spreading all around the world. This affects some places more and were labeled as “Red” Zones with high risk, where courier deliveries are banned.

UPS and DHL both announced Zip codes for such “Red” zones where they will not perform deliveries.

We put a link to their pages at our CHECKOUT page as these lists are updated frequently and we can’t follow up and code exceptions in our online shop:

So please, at the time of ordering, check if your ZIP code is listed there. If your area is on the list, your parcel will just hang up in courier’s warehouse.

EMS service is terminated in Bulgaria, DPD and Airmail (posts) for the moment didn’t make any restrictions.

In Bulgaria we have a relatively low count of infected people and we at Olimex work as usual. Our government placed strong restrictions on public services and the travel of people between cities, but inside cities movement is not restricted.

NEW SHIPPING OPTIONS DHL EXPRESS AND DHL GLOBAL MAIL

We signed agreement with DHL and now we offer their DHL GLOBAL EXPRESS service in our online shop.

The rates are very competitive from EUR 15 to EUR 20 for 0.5 KG all around the world. You can check yourself 😉

Another interesting service is their DHL Global Mail. As many of you know DHL is property of Deutsche Post – one of the largest EU post operator. They have introduced this service: bag of parcels from Bulgaria to Germany where the parcels are re-distributed by Deutsche Post later. The only condition is that there must be at least 20 parcels to use this service.

Bulgarian post is good for EU destinations and 99% of all shipments arrive within one week, also there is very good service for Japan, where parcels arrive again for about week, but something is broken with Bulgarian-post for USA destination where is normal one parcel to travel 5-6 weeks or more (around Christmas even 8+ weeks). So we may give it a try as DHL Global Mail state that the shipping take 4-5 days from Germany to USA, so when add the DHL transport from Bulgaria to Germany the travel time will be about 1 week. The only problem I see is that we have no so much Airmail shipments to USA and DHL Global Mail require at least 20 parcels to use this service – we wrote everywhere on our web site that AIRMAIL to USA is not reliable and very few people dare to use this service now :), so we may need another week to collect 20 parcels for USA destination, but again this will be 2 weeks transit time not 5-6 weeks and once the volumes go up the travel time may be just 1 week.

The DHL Global Mail rates are competitive for the small parcels but rise about same as DHL Global Express for 2 KG weight so it’s useful for small 0.5 – 1.0 KG parcels:

up to 0.5 KG cost EUR 9.50

up to 1.0 KG cost EUR 17.50

up to 1.5 KG cost EUR 24.50

up to 2.0 KG cost EUR 32.50

DHL Global Mail parcel can’t weight more than 2KG