It’s almost Christmas now and I just wanted to touch a few subjects, some related to our website and some planned activities that you might be interested in hearing about.

1. Ebay Orders and general remarks about shipping

For a few months now we have been offering a selected choice of our goods on Ebay. This has led to a great increase in our overall order volume (a good thing) and we are greeting all our new friends and customers who found us through Ebay from the heart!

This development has actually prompted us to employ a new member of our team, Thomas Masia Machaka,  who is dedicated to the processing and shipping of all orders.

Thomas can be contacted under masia@orgonise-africa.net with any questions regarding orders.

In the beginning of this unexpected surge in orders we had a few hiccups due to the high workload and some orders experienced delays in shipping. If you find an item is missing or something like that, it will of course be rectified asap.

Just to explain our procedure with Ebay orders a bit:

When an order reflects as paid, we print the invoices and it goes in the packing queue. We mark the order as “shipped” on Ebay at this very moment in order not to get confused which invoices were printed. Ebay allows no marking as “in process” or “we are working on it” as we have on our website unfortunately.

We do send out notifications once an order is actually out – which may be a few days later - and in that notification you will find the tracking number of your shipment.

Please understand that tracking with the regular postal service is very limited, especially of course for overseas parcels.

If we were to use one of the courier companies like FEDEX, UPS or DHL, shipping costs would however be inappropriately high in relation to the value of the goods. So we have used the South African Post Office successfully since 6 years.  

Most Ebay orders go out by registered airmail, that’s the default. Only the Power Wands are by default EMS.

You must understand that these are international orders when you are in the US, Canada or Europe like 80-90% of our customers are.

Once the parcels leave South Africa, normally after 2 days from posting, they are no longer tracked on www.sapo.co.za.

They will show “in transit” as status almost indefinitely.

In the receiving countries, procedures are different for almost each country, so we cannot even know how it works for each specific country. The USPS told us that limited tracking is possible with the original numbers, such as RD123456789ZA (registered small airmail parcel)  or EE123456789ZA for EMS. EMS is the same service that is called “Global Express” in the US. Typically parcels arrive within 5-8 working days from sending. Airmail parcels don’t get pushed through customs like this and normally take about 10 days, now with the festive season they sometimes take much longer.

There is nothing much we can do to influence this or even tell you “where your parcel is” at the moment. So try to be patient, they do arrive!

We have not really lost a single parcel in the last few years. Sometimes a parcel came back to us with the postal note “not claimed” on them.

If you have not received an airmail parcel after say 2 or 3 weeks, the first step would be to contact your national Post Office, preferably the central customer service hotline and ask them how to track an incoming foreign parcel. Many countries assign incoming foreign parcels new “internal” numbers which can then  be tracked on your own national tracking system. I know this is the case in Germany and the UK.

On our website, many people chose the cheapest shipping option, namely surface mail and get a shock later when they find out  that surface mail really takes long. It actually mostly goes by ship.

So transit times are any thing from 4-12 weeks. We recommend surface mail only for bulky orders, where the saving may be considerable.

Generally we advise of following expected time frames for shipping:

Airmail:            10-28 days

EMS:                5-8 working days

Surface Mail:     4-12 weeks

Another issue I wanted to touch relates specifically to Ebay Orders.

Many of our new customers ask us to “combine orders”, hoping for extravagant shipping discounts. This is causing a lot of extra hassle for us and I feel torn between the wish to accommodate understandable wishes and the need to streamline our packing process. Basically what happens here is, when we receive an order, we print the invoice and it enters a queue for packing. If we start messing with orders after this has happened, it causes confusion and leads to errors.

Also the combination of Website orders and Ebay orders does not lead to extra shipping discounts. Often it’s already packed and then someone wins a good on Ebay and asks if the shipping will be cheaper if we combine the order.

We don’t do that as a matter of principle.

We treat the Ebay orders as “stand alone” if it happens that they are really coming in the same day, we will send them together but that’s all.

This may seem like a bit of an injustice sometimes, but you must keep in mind, that most Ebay orders come in at a much reduced price and the shipping on Ebay goods is not calculated even at cost in most cases.

If you are bidding on several items, we have now adopted the following policy:

Items won within a few days from each other can be combined and the shipping of all additional items after the first will be reduced by 1.50 $ for each item.

With all this said, I think you just have to understand where we are located and that our very attractive prices are somewhat offset by longer shipping times and higher shipping cost than if you would order in your own country. We have a reliable track record of more than 6 years and if ever anything goes wrong we have never let someone down.

Check out what’s on offer at Ebay here: http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/orgoniseafrica

2. Christmas Special

 Yeah, I know it’s getting late for Christmas orders now, especially after what I said above about shipping times. (I’m such a marketing fool, telling you all this deterring stuff…)

On the other hand, what could be a nicer Christmas gift than a few beautiful pieces of orgonite from Orgonise Africa?

A lot of our recent customers have already found a loving little extra gift from Friederike in their parcels. (surprise, surprise!)

Now this is what we have come up with in order to accommodate those of you who still want to get some gifts for their loved ones and make reasonably sure they arrive before the date:

All orders over a value of R 1,500.00 (approx. 115 Euro or 147 USD) will get a 5% discount on the value of products and the shipping will be upgraded from Airmail to EMS, so you have a 99% chance to get it before Christmas if you order immediately or well before the 15^th . This special is limited to including the 15^th of December. Since we always need a few days lead time to process your order, it would be safer to order before the 10^th though if you really want to make sure it arrives in time.

You have to chose Airmail for this to apply. Surface Mail orders are not being upgraded.