The Microbrand Store Reviews 

Antwoord van The Microbrand Store

Geüpdatet op 8 sep 2021

Hi Huw,

Your watch was tested and shipped within 8 hours of you placing your order and quickly arrived within the UK within 5 days. It is currently being held at your local depot (since the end of August) pending your outstanding tax payment, which your local tax office wrote to you about on the 1st September, and which you can pay online with a credit card if you wish to. If you no longer have the notice then you can contact your local post office or ParcelForce, who can assist you. You are always welcome to contact us via our online chat or email if you need us to provide you with the tracking information again.

Given that you have never made any attempt to contact us for assistance before posting this 1 star review, and the watch was shipped to you incredibly quickly, and is being held at your regional depot because you have not paid taxes on it yet, we feel that this one star review is very unfair since it doesn't reflect on the quality of our service in any way. We therefore hope that you'll reconsider your rating.

Best Wishes,

The Microbrand Store Team.

Update:

Hi Huw,

Thank you for your update. You can use the tracking details from the email we sent to you when the watch was shipped. Please do contact us via email or better yet via our online chat so we can assist you since we are not permitted to share your personal details here. If you've paid the import taxes already and it was online on the 3rd then it sounds like UK customs may have dropped the ball. Although that is out of our control, we can easily provide the necessary information to you as the importer so you can show ParcelForce or your local postmaster to hopefully quickly clear things up if you also show them the details of your tax payment, such as a receipt.

Antwoord van The Microbrand Store

Geüpdatet op 27 jun 2021

Hi Sean,

We're very happy you like your new timepiece, and we do very much appreciate your feedback, which actually shocked us. As it happens, we do indicate the import duty (0% on watches) and taxes (5%) for Canada on our web site here:
https://microbrand.store/pages/faq

The total you should have paid to UPS should have been around 5% of your total purchase price plus typically an optional nominal customs broker fee of usually around $10-$15 or so. (Optional as you can choose to handle customs yourself instead. All of the courier services usually act as the customs broker for imports, so 99% of the time, most folks just pay the nominal handling fee.)

Given your watch price was under $370 USD, a $100 customs fee sounds very wrong here. If you'd pinged us, we'd have recommended to decline accepting the delivery and have UPS hold it pending a validation of the customs charges. Did you get a receipt from the UPS driver for the ~ $100 you paid? If so, we recommend talking to UPS to see if you can get a correction and refund from them. If not, you should report that to them ASAP as, although we've never had this experience and have shipped watches in the thousands, it's possible that your driver may have pocketed some extra cash here.

Please feel free to use the live chat box on our web site at https://microbrand.store/pages/contact-us if we can help regarding providing you copies of any of our shipping documents, and thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Antwoord van The Microbrand Store

Geüpdatet op 2 jun 2021

Hi Martin,

Thank you for your feedback.

We see that it took you around 10 days to received your new timepiece. Unfortunately there is not much we or anyone else can do if there are delays in international shipping due to the pandemic, which is why no courier services are guaranteeing delivery times right now, and we've seen delays with every service: DHL, EMS, FedEx, UPS, etc. Pre-pandemic, all of our watches were shipped for free and with delivery typically within 4 business days, no matter the location worldwide. We hope when things get back to normal worldwide, that shipping times (and prices) return to their old levels.

During the pandemic, most of our watches are still being shipped internationally for free. For just a few countries, we do charge a shipping fee, and that is only for our cheapest watches. Even then the fee we charge is actually a fraction of the price we're paying to get your watch to you. (Your shipment cost for us was over $120 USD.) Unfortunately for those countries still with COVID-19 shipping restrictions, our international shipping costs have literally tripled, but we're beginning to see those restrictions being lifted one or two countries at a time. If you placed an order a couple of months from now, the odds are you likely would get free shipping on all watch orders, including our lowest priced timepieces.

If you'd like more information, we do explain this in more detail on our home page at https://the.microbrand.store, and go into more detail on our Covid-19 Update page. The vast majority of our customers currently do get free shipping on all watch orders, and we very much hope that we can soon return to that situation for all of our watch orders, but in the meantime we're doing the best we can under the circumstances.