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- Hacker News
- It's pretty much like trying to get something shipped to Argentina, a royal pain in the ass.
The laptop would pay a 50% fee over the (declared value + shipping cost). Couriers will mostly deal with that on send, but if sent through regular mail you need to declare and pay before you get it.
If you didn't include your tax number as part of the address (doesn't matter in which field), there's a non-zero chance that the package will be lost, held indefinitely or returned to sender.
It's great that there are people willing to help even in these conditions.
by juancn - I tried to do the same from USA to Turkey. Can't ship lithium. So my brother took the laptop to Germany, and then shipped it to Ankara.
The laptop was never released from the customs. The Turkish reps were rude and expected bribe and pretended they don't understand english. After few months it was returned back to Germany. My cousins' laptop had a keyboard issue and local shops would not replace it and the HP agents on the ground also didn't want to help.
by dbgrman - I've once had the displeasure of having to interact Turkish customs because I got a merch kit from Intel, since it was under 30 Euros (nowadays simplified customs declaration isn't even a thing you have to go the same way as a commercial importer does,which you appear to have gone through, bribery seems to be expected) I didn't deal with Turkish customs directly but the fact that that I had to pay 60% of its value still annoys me to this day. I've also had to decline a second merch kit later because they removed the entire simplified customs declaration thing. I'm also currently trying to obtain SDR which it's market seems to be practically nuked, because of this customs shenanigansby takipsizad
- That's pretty cool. I've also realized that even a small amount of money can solve a lot of problems for someone. I've been helping people in the SF Bay who are fighting cancer by giving them laptops. So far, I've assembled and donated three using parts I already had, and I bought a few more online specifically for this purpose. One more (the fourth) hasn't been given away yet.
It reminded me of when I was a student. I used to repair laptops and resell them. Going through cancer in my family these days, I understand how important it is to help people when you can. It makes you a slightly better person, at least in your own eyes.
by RomanPushkin - I learned the hard way that I couldn't just ship a laptop to myself from the USA to Mexico. I had a nice, new-ish Macbook Pro that I wanted to use sitting in the USA, and the laptop I was using in Mexico was getting old. What I should have done was just fly to the USA to get the nice laptop and then hand carry it back. What I did instead was ship the laptop via Fedex to my address in Mexico. Big mistake.
Fedex informed me that my laptop was stuck in customs. This wasn't a pay-a-fee-and-get-your-stuff kind of stuck. I couldn't pay any amount of money to get the laptop out. I had to find a local import partner which could take weeks or months to do just to get this stupid computer out of customs. And that's assuming they didn't destroy the laptop before I could claim it. There was literally no way for me to just pay some big ol' tax to get the computer.
Eventually I asked if I could have the laptop shipped back to the USA, and they were happy to do this. So I shipped the laptop from the USA to Mexico, from Mexico to a friend's place, and then I bought my frienbd a roundtrip ticket to Mexico to enjoy a vacation on the condition that he brought my damn computer with him.
- So many characters worthy of an epic story. The last one would be the Good Samaritan, or some sort of elderly sage...
> Before leaving, I asked him whether he even knew what was inside the package.
> He answered very casually that he had no idea and that he did not need to know.
> I then asked whether he at least knew which company had entrusted him with the delivery. He replied that it was simply "a friend" who had asked him to temporarily keep the box until someone came to collect it.
> I switched it on briefly, and that was actually the moment when the hardware shop owner himself suddenly became excited[...] Seeing the Apple logo appear on the screen, he immediately smiled and said something along the lines of, "Ah… a MacBook is a MacBook. Apple is still Apple."
by nxobject - The goodness of the people in the chain make me think that the rider would have had a much greater than 50% chance of following through properly. But it's good that Django decided to further increase the odds by taking matters into his own hands.by benatkin
- Long-distance shipping is even a pain in the (so-called) developed world, for instance from Europe to the US. As soon as your shipping value exceeds a treshold (IIRC about 1000€), you have to electronically declare the customs. There are agencies specialized to do this for sth like 20€ per shipping just because it is not reasonable to get all the accounts if you do it only once in a while.
However, in my experience, "ordinary" parcel shipping (like DHL) won't do this shipping either any more: You have to switch to the express ones (like DHL express, UPS, FedEx) even if you don't intend to do any express. The difference is easily 40€ vs 400€ for shipping a shoe box!
If you ship anything slightly larger then a shoe box and slightly more expensive then a notebook, think twice whether you don't want to accompany the freight with a seat in the commodity class in some airplane. It can easily be cheaper.
by ktpsns - > As soon as your shipping value exceeds a treshold (IIRC about 1000€), you have to electronically declare the customs.
The threshold is zero in my experience. I volunteer with a small non-profit publisher, and last year we shipped a few hundred magazines to Europe but with the wrong customs labels. These are black-and-white technical journals shipped in clear plastic, so even with missing labels, they very obviously have almost zero value.
But because we had the wrong customs labels, about half of them were held at the border and our members had to pay the duties themselves, since it was too late for us to pay them. I think that one member had to pay almost 20€: 0.20€ in VAT, plus 19€ in "fees". We sell the issues for $4.50 each (plus shipping), so it was quite a surprise when we started hearing about how high the fees were.
This isn't due to inexperience either, since we've shipped ~1k copies to Europe every year for over 40 years. But we had just switched shipping providers, and our new provider had just written "magazine" as the label without any further details. For the next shipment, we added a proper customs code and prepaid the duties where possible, and that seems to have solved the problem.
- No kidding. My old company needed to replace an aircraft engine part for a customer in Japan, and it ended up being something like a third of the cost and time to give one of our mechanics essentially a weeklong vacation rather than ship it (as a bonus, he was able to hand carry the broken part back for failure analysis, rather than having to deal with equally expensive and slow return shipping).by scarier
- The most amazing thing about my travels in Africa, specifically Uganda, is that things I would never expect to work, work. The people are so innovative and resourceful that I think things that would be scams (handing a laptop to a stranger to hold) are pretty common and work.
Also makes me grateful to live in a developed nation where we can take shipping for granted.
by prepend - > things that would be scams (handing a laptop to a stranger to hold) are pretty common and work.
You don't think the "friend" of this hardware shop owner wanted to see if someone manages to track it down to that holding place before nicking the parcel? Plausible deniability at every step: the shop owner didn't know (might get a cut but you don't know that), the deliverer can say they just didn't have time to come for it and deliver it yet, and only by Django tracking it down, did it make it to him
by Aachen - When laws and contract don’t work well, it’s all about reputation. After a while, everything becomes a network of friends and businesses with reputation to lose.by skydhash
- My question, does Uganda not have used laptops available for sale? At the point where you're about to spend $200 on shipping, why not consider just doing a money order so the guy can find one locally.
Shipping things overseas is such a convoluted process. My wife wanted to send a company Christmas gift bundle (literally just company merch and some candy) to two Filipino employees. One of the workers says that only DHL reliability delivers to her so I help my wife with getting a shipping label. Holy shit, I'm just sending a tshirt, mug, and some pens. Why do I need to list out the contents and their international categories like I'm trying to send a shipping container full of rifles? Also addresses for people living in villages in PI are weird, the address was relative to the town hall. Luckily the other person lived in a gated community with a more familiar address formatting. Finally I figure everything out and she buys the label and pays the tariffs (more expensive than the gifts but it's too late now). Luckily there's a DHL near my work so I go to drop off the two very carefully wrapped packages. Of course she wraps both like an actual gift with cute tissue paper and of course the DHL agent has to open it and inspect it, ruining the care my wife put into the wrapping. Overall the experience was mind boggling bureaucratic. Sending via USPS would likely have been a bit easier but the warning of unreliable local mail was concerning. The next year, she just had the CEO send them an extra bonus instead.
by wildzzz - Christians colonized Africa and destroyed their cultures and tribes for not converting and now you send them a Christmas gift to them.
Hope Africans see these Europeans true colors
by throw12353 - I am Ugandan, that $200 could have gone a long way buying used locally , case in point https://jiji.ug/central-division/computers-and-laptops/lapto... , a used Macbook pro with some change to spare.by madradavid
- ~$200 doesn't go as far as you'd expect for good used laptop, even in Uganda. We did look into our options.
However, there's definitely a sunk cost aspect to the operation. After the first failure to send it through Australia Post, I became determined that Django was going to have that MacBook.
by lexandstuff - I help a good friend run a small business in Africa, and this story is exactly why, every time I go visit, I fill my luggage with stuff she needs. Laptops, car engine turbos, espresso machines, fryers, bottles of shampoo, printers, anything. The cheapest and most reliable way to deliver things there is to take a plane yourself and carry the things with you. This whole mess is why, despite being a poor continent, the price of goods is actually much higher than in rich developed countries, which puts a huge brake on the development of the countries.
It is also quite sad that the western NGOs, which all have their own very functional and heavily subsidised delivery channels, keep it to themselves, instead of making it available to the general public and businesses of the countries. Their monopolies on efficient import is weird and counter productive.
by fvdessen - Car engine turbo? Can I get a photo of that packing?by po1nt
- > It is also quite sad that the western NGOs, which all have their own very functional and heavily subsidised delivery channels, keep it to themselves
For every dozen people mailing in a laptop, there'll be someone mailing in guns. They don't want that liability. It would damage their ability to do what they do.
- The NGO delivery channels are privileged because they are charitable. That's why they get to bypass the country's restrictions. You can't open that channel up, the country would object at humanitarian exemptions being used as a backdoor for commercial imports.
- This is not how it works. My partner is Ugandan, we live in France - I'm used to ship to various countries in Africa. Never use the "regular" post - it is just as OP described. Don't use high-end couriers (DHL, Fedex etc.) either - very expensive for scant value added. Do what every local does: use one of the innumerable grey market freight forwarders. One way or the other (for a typical "line haul" example, they entrust extra carry-on luggage to airline passengers remunerated for the service), they get packages to their destination, and they are not even expensive.
They know the thicket of rules and petty fiefdoms, what rules apply and which don't, what to pay and to whom... Regular post just acts as if everything works by the book - and that doesn't fly. Use word-of-mouth to find the good couriers, trawl through your local community of people from the destination country - it is a very common service, so you'll soon find a good provider. Test it with a couple of low-stakes deliveries and you'll have a solid channel.
Meet your guy in a metro station, or find the shop in Barbès that smells like a marketplace across the Mediterranean, hand over your package with the recipient's name, destination city (Addresses ? Where we're going we don't need addresses !), your phone number and the recipient's phone number scrawled on it with a felt-tip marker (make sure they are Whatsapp numbers), pay in cash, don't get a receipt (lol) - and there you go !
Operating in Africa will soon tire you if you attempt to force European ways. Going with the flow (with appropriate caution - a nose for issues, borne from experience, is invaluable) works and makes the experience enjoyable !
by liotier - This all sounds like really good reasons not to have anything to do with the place.by doxeddaily
- It’s funny to me that this is increasingly how packages are delivered in the US, too.
Asking someone who’s going that way already to drop it on their way is inherently efficient in some circumstances.
Once there’s remuneration, it’s not a big jump to making the trip just for that. Add an app and the gig economy is born.
by james_marks - But this process, including sending smaller items first etc sounds like it would have taken longer than what the OP did? And the OP was trying to do it quickly to tie in with the beginning of the semester?by scraft
- I've done some military charity work in Ukraine, getting donations from people in my community and ensuring that money gets turned into vehicles and equipment reaching soldiers that I personally know in Eastern Ukraine. Just a small "hobby" really, not on a big scale; I'm certainly not a charity professional.
On multiple occasions I've shipped things with the Nova Poshta service to units very close to the front line. In some cases they're getting picked up at Nova Poshta shipping outlets so close to the front lines that FPV drones are a genuine risk.
It just works. Nova Poshta has a nice app. There's complete and accurate tracking, you can easily redirect shipments on the fly to different locations and even different people, and they have package lockers everywhere. The staff are very friendly and go above and beyond to help out. I once showed up at a Kyiv branch with four used truck tires covered with mud, without any packaging, and said I needed to get them to a unit in Sloviansk, a town 20kms from the front lines. They handled everything for me for the equivalent of ~$30 and they showed up the next day.
If Ukraine can manage shipping at scale in the middle of a war, WTF is Africa doing? Why do you have to rely on sketchy shit like trusting random airline passengers getting some extra cash on the side? You can't have a modern economy without good shipping services.
I'm reminded of the time I visited both Kyiv and South Africa in Febuary 2024... Cape Town and Johannesburg had more scheduled blackouts than Kyiv, even with Russia actively trying to destroy the electricity grid. The GDP/capita of South Africa is higher than Ukraine!
by petertodd - Two main takeaways:
1. Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it)
2. Django's gratitude and positivity in the face of all of it is an inspiration. I suspect I and most everyone I know would be in tears and would have given up in exasperation halfway through his quest. We are so spoiled in the West.
by xp84 - I agree with the second point especially. What stood out to me was not just that Django endured the bureaucracy, but that he remained grateful and composed through itby interludead
- > We are so spoiled in the West.
This can happen in the West too.
I volunteered at a homeless shelter, and we helped those who had lost everything get important documents like their Social Security card and s state ID, and the bureaucracy was atrocious. Sometimes we literally had to beg a senator's office to help.
At least they didn't ask for bribes, but I wonder if that would've made things easier.
by throw2837363 - It’s crazy that it’s magnitudes cheaper for me from the EU to go to a poor country with non existing administration, than the people from there to come to the EU. And magnitudes more convenient. Just to get a passport; for me, it’s a nuance and it basically costs nothing; for a lot of people in those countries, it’s impossible to get one legally, and one costs 100s or 1000s of dollars illegally. And that’s just the passport, not the traveling itself.by ruszki