Made my first purchase on Aliexpress in November, some electronic parts that where more than 3 times more expensive on Shoppee and obviously coming from the big C anyway, plus I was in no hurry.
Added the address in both Chinese characters and pinyin, all seemed good. Package eventually made it through customs but then immediately showed an error from logistics saying the address was unknow. It didn’t resolve itself so I got in touch with Aliexpress who couldn’t find it and escalated it to their support team, support team finally got back simply suggesting request a refund. Tried twice more with the same result. Vendor was also unhelpful, also suggesting to get in touch with the courier without being able to say who the courier was.
Gave it one last shot and using Globaltracking and 17track was eventually able to dig through various reference numbers and find that Singapore post had delivered the registered package to Taiwan but then the trail went cold. Guessing it might be being handled by ChungHwa post I picked one of their contact email addresses from their website and sent an email around 10pm last night. Got a phone call this morning from my local post office at 8.30am asking for the exact address, provided it and I received the package before noon today! Also received an email from ChungHwa post and could see my original email had been forwarded a few times during the night before finding it’s correct home.
Whoever had printed the address label used a computer not capable of printing characters so the Chinese address just came out as 's and the pinyin was pushed off the edge of the label so only Taiwan and Xindian were visible.
Instead of Unicode - Wikipedia encoding they used the old Guobiao standard (maybe GB 2312) that only supports simple Chinese characters.
One basically has to convert traditional characters to simple characters when ordering from that website.
It’s bizarre, thinking it’s a result of whatever tarrif/tax/cheap shipping things they have in place. The label on the package is printed by Singapore Post and shows the sender as someone in Singapore however there are two other labels under that one. At first I thought they’d reused packaging but I seen my name through the top label. Digging down it looks like the original label has the full name and address in Chinese so whatever system hand offs occurred the characters and part of the pinyin got dropped, but more importantly my phone number is not on the top label.
Totally agree. Taiwan post is pretty amazing. The EZ post system, I haze some comments ts kn. But overall, they are great.
As usual, Taiwan often fixes all of China and their little sister Singapores problems. As @slawa mentions, it’s probably the coding. Which is EASILY fixed. I mean every text editor allows this. I even write website swith notepad and don’t have this issue.
It is, obviously, intentional. They would never admit to being THAT innept! Especially China 2.0. I mean, Singapore. Frustrating as all F. When ti comes to thos eidiots, I only use English. Taiwna post is excellent at figuring out English addresses as well. So we can enable those uneducated shit hole countries
And high praise for the banking system in the post office too! I stuck my ATM card in with some trepidation since I hadn’t used it in six years, and cash immediately came out, no problem. In the States, that would have been six phone calls and two hours at the bank trying to prove who I was, if the account hadn’t been permanently deleted already.
Just moved from our farm house in an area where the poor mailman had to ride his motorcycle a long way between houses. We got to know our mailmen through many conversations at the mailbox while we gave them fruit from our trees. They have a tough job riding through bad weather and hot summers. I hung a plastic box beneath our mailbox as I receive alot of large envelops so the mailmen appreciated just dropping our large letters in the box instead of trying to stuff in the mailbox.
On our last day at the house we drove to the main office to see our mailmen and give them one last bag of fruit. The mailmen helped us apply for a mail forwarding to our new address and promised to be on the lookout for our mail. One of the mailmen was emotional almost to the point of crying. Funny how you can build up a friendly relationship when both sides simply are nice to each other.
Custom house was great. In Hualien. But my original plan was for ten years of farm life and then move closer back to Taipei. I am only 65 but not healthy enough to maintain my place. Last year every time we went on vacation I came back to trees toppled over and other stuff damaged by typhoons. Only a matter of time before would overwhelm me.
Now living in a fancy highrise in Yilan. From my balcony I can see people using weed cutters in a field. Brings back memories of needing to 6 tough hours to cut weeds and another two hours with the lawnmover…
I’ve ordered components from Aliexpress numerous times over the years without any issue. Sometimes I would use (traditional) Chinese characters, other times I would use English characters. Sometimes the vendors might request one format or the other.
Anyways, I ordered six different packages from different vendors over the past month and it has been a nightmare. For reference I had used my English address. Aside from my name and Taichung City, everything else was omitted from the address. My phone number wasn’t even included! One vendor I could understand, and at one point I even thought it may have been the fault of the courier Morning Global (which I had never used before), figuring maybe their software couldn’t handle the length of an English address which would explain why it got truncated. This doesn’t seem to be the case though, as I’m having problems with a parcel from Singapore Post too. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem to be a specific vendor issue, as these parcels were coming from different vendors.
I’ve managed to call Chunghwa Post and tracked down each package after it has arrived in my city, but it has been a nightmare to be honest. I have one package I need to attempt to “catch” tomorrow, and then another one likely sometime next week.
When I spoke to the Chunghwa Post guy in Taipei import / export office (I forget the exact name of the place), he told me that recently this has been a really big problem with lots of parcels arriving in the country and not being deliverable due to issues with the addresses. I really do have to wonder what is going on.
I assume it’s whatever service they’re using in China(?) to consolidate shipments for customs, for some reason the pinyin addresses are getting truncated and, for me at least, the Chinese characters lost.
Do apreciate ChungHwa Post’s efforts on what is not their problem, in my home country anything without a proper address would like go straight into the bin or home with an employee!
's and the pinyin was pushed off the edge of the label so only Taiwan and Xindian were visible.
