POLICY NOTICE: International Shipping Suspended Indefinitely

Hello 5X Fam, 

This is a tough one to have to write as we have been gaining more and more international customers over the years since opening up international shipping on our site, but once again the Covid-19 pandemic is showing it's teeth in not just the health and well-being of us, but also within our supply chain (how we get parts and even get parts manufactured) and now in international shipping.

We use USPS (United Postal Service) for most all of our shipping of in-stock parts. It's usually the most affordable for small packages, they give us free boxes, and they pick up our packages for free everyday (for the most part, if our regular Postal Service worker is on duty...). It's a no-brainer for us to use USPS for shipping, BUT, we've been experiencing terrible issues with our package deliveries both domestic and even worse for international orders. There's a very large likelihood that if we ship something internationally, it will never arrive at its destination.

Pre-Covid, USPS International shipments used to be a 6-10 day arrival time. During Covid, possibly never to be delivered.

We know Covid is responsible for reducing workforces and we can understand that a reduced workforce will dictate a delay in the process, but we're seeing deliveries just not even make it to our customers.

With this trouble, we have decided that it is not worth the headache on our part and heartache on your part when you're expecting a package from us, only to see it's supposed to be there, but never makes it. We also have our hands tied with solving any of this, as we cannot just ship you another replacement out of our pocket because the USPS lost it. These packages are insured, but we are not getting any notices that they are actually lost, so we're not collecting any insurance on them. We can't lose 100% of the profit on replacing a shipment that never arrived hoping to get the insurance claim from it sometime in the future, not to mention the extra effort it takes for us to process and prepare an international package, which is not the easiest of shipping tasks. If you have never done this before, you have to print 3 pages of paper with the included goods and their intended purpose, along with the values, into a plastic pouch that the USPS provides for you, or are at least are "supposed" to provide, as they can't even seem to provide those for us anymore and recommend using "ziplock" bags instead... On top of that, when it arrives to the destination country, it must clear customs. This is where the agents in that country inspect the package using those 3 pages of paper and decide what they do with it from there. It could be opened and further inspected, confiscated, lost, thrown into some random bin, or less likely nowadays actually processed and sent for delivery to you. 

What it all boils down to is us being in a terrible position to go through the effort to ship internationally, only to have the packages disappear and never reach you. We're then left to clean up the mess somehow, which heavily burdens our team of one (Brittany, who processes all of the orders and ships them, then handles the customer service when there is an issue). We're really left with no choice other than to suspend all international shipments indefinitely until the USPS and destination countries postal services collectively get their $hit together and get our packages to our customers. This will take a while...

I hope you understand this dilemma and can put yourselves in our shoes for a minute to understand our family run business cannot handle this extra burden at the moment, and we also hate seeing your excitement in shopping with us and looking forward to receiving our products get dashed when the package is lost somewhere in the Covid-sphere. We apologize for this, and wish we could spread the 5X Racing Miata love around the world, but... all of the above.

Thanks for reading and understanding,

John - 5X Owner