Your everything sending/receiving mail and packages Cuenca thread

I have a mail box in the U.S. with US Global Mail.  While I think I can eventually get by without a mail box in the U.S., it has been useful during my transitional period, especially due to the visa fiasco I have been dealing with.

While I would not use them for shipping packages since there are cheaper alternatives, such as direct mailing or Club Correos, for forwarding my letters to Ecuador they have been satisfactory.

As far as I can tell from looking at different web sites, U.S. Global Mail has one primary advantage over their competitors, and that is their Fedex rates for shipping envelopes.  If I send a single envelope via Fedex it costs me $30, and it arrives in less than 7 days.

I had some friends who had a family member forward a credit card to them here from the states. They went into the local Fedex office and it cost them $89 to have it mailed here.  That is the rate you will also get if you do the calculation online at Fedex.com.  Of course, I am also paying $15 a month to U.S. Global mail, which my friends are not.

Just about every expat I have met has used Club Correos to ship purchases from the United States to Cuenca. A while back, my neighbor who had recently joined Club Correos asked me to help him track down the location of his package.

Using the link he provided, we accessed the website and logged on. Much to my surprise the layout and information available to him was completely different to what I was accustomed to.

It turns out that Club Correos has parallel operations with different domain names, websites and shipping addresses.

My neighbor accesses his Club Correos control panel using this website: econcargoecuador.com/clubcorreos/

I on the other hand access my Club Correos control using this website: secure2.transexpress.com/clubcorreos/

Interestingly, if either one of us logs from the clubcorreos.com website we are correctly redirected to our respective websites.

Another interesting thing is if click the "register here" tab they are redirect you to the econcargoecuador.com/clubcorreos/register.php website.

So does any of this matter?

My impression is the control panel at econcargoecuador.com is not as good as the one at transexpress.com.  I also think there is much more detailed information about the status of your packages on the transexpress.com website.  For instance, when looking at my neighbor's control panel, there was no information information regarding the weight of the package, which is useful for knowing how they charged you.

I purchased an album from Amazon.com with digital delivery last night. The cost of the album was 98 cents and they charged me 8 cents in sales tax. They don't tell me on the invoice, but clearly they are charging me the Texas sales tax rate of 8.25 percent since my credit card billing address reflects the mailing address I have with U.S. Global Mail. Amazon started collecting sales tax for online purchases in Texas beginning in July of 2012.

However, Amazon has not reached an agreement with Florida, so they are not collecting sales tax for online sales made in that state. And since Miami Florida is the Club Correos shipping destination for the physical goods I have bought from Amazon, I have not been subject to sales tax for these purchases, despite the fact my billing address is based out of Texas. I suspect this will change in the next couple years, and we will be subject to Florida's sales tax rate. 

If I really wanted to avoid sales tax on the digital deliveries of albums or software from Amazon.com, I could sign up with this service as my mail forwarding service which is based out of Oregon, where there is no sales tax. Then update my credit card billing address to reflect the change.

I have sent a few letters to the states, sometimes with delivery confirmation and sometimes without.

Usually I would ask in Spanish for confirmation of delivery, using the phrase "confirmacion de entrega".  However, one of those of times the guy at the window answered back "con tracking", which I thought was his effort to use a little English with me.

Well today, I was at the Ecuadorian post office's web page and there were four characteristics listed in Spanish about a particular delivery option. The third item lists "Tracking". You won't find that word in Spanish dictionaries, but clearly they have adapted the English word as part of their nomenclature in the Post Office.

Características:
• No genera reporte de entrega.
• Sin acuse de recibo.
• Tracking (Rastreo en la Página Web)
• No tiene derecho a indemnización

Courtesy of Vinny66's blackberry, here is the Fedex location out by the Airport.  I shipped an envelope last week to Texas last week for $52 that took about 3 days to arrive. There is a dropoff location in a clothing shop in El Centro as well, whose photo and address I will post soon.



Compañía: Pasar del Ecuador S.A.
Avenida Hurtado de Mendoza 2-119 y Pan de Azúcar
593.7. 2818349, 593.7. 2870759
(Frente a la pista de Bicicross)
Working Hours:
Monday - Friday, 09:00 - 18:00
Saturday, 09:00 - 13:00

Check this out Peeps. If you click on the link below, you will see the word Fedex in the center of the screen. It only appears at the zoom level specified in the link.

If you type in the words Fedex Cuenca in the search box, you will get a search result with the full address information. If  you click that, you will then see a red arrow for the Fedex location on the map.

This is the result of me editing the map and putting in the details.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-2.88 … 8&layers=M

On the Transexpress version of Club Correos there is a page where you can calculate the cost of your shipment based on city of destination and weight.

However, there is a page buried in the support section that explains that there two criteria they use for determining how much to charge you: physical weight and volume. So you may have a very light package, but if the package is very long, you may be charged more than you were expecting.

However, if you go to the econcargo version of Club Correos, and click on the tariffs link, it says in Spanish:

Nuestras tarifas dependen unicamente del peso fisico (Libras) del paquete

In English that translates:

Our rates depend only on the physical weight (pounds) of the package

So, seemingly Econcargo doesnt have use the same criteria as Transexpress for calculating shipping charges. I should mention that both flavors of Club Correos have the same rates when using weight as the only criteria

I wanted to register for their service and send an email to Econcargo to confirm this fact, but the registration page wanted a 10 digit passport or cedula number and mine is only 9 digit.

Anyway, I hope to follow-up on this at a later time.

Based on the following Gringo Tree post from this morning, it appears that I should have been using DHL instead of Fedex.

DHL Recommended

My wife and I needed to get a signed document to the U.S. within three business. Express mail through the postal service in Ecuador takes 5-6 business days. UPS and FedEx use subcontractors out of Cuenca and were unable to get the job done. Fortunately, DHL Express got the job done promptly at a cost less than UPS or FedEx.  I was in and out of the DHL's company-operated location in less than ten minutes. The lady at the counter spoke fluent English and was very friendly and professional.

DHL Express is located at Alfonso Cordero 3-53 y Manuel J Calle, in the Milenium Plaza area. DHL's phone number is 07-410-4188.

Recommended by Mark Brown at mbrownins@yahoo.com.

I had another problem ordering something over the internet the other day.  Specifically, I wanted to download and update my computer with Windows 8 which was released a few days back.

Microsoft provides a special utility for performing the upgrade. Once I got to the stage where I had to enter my billing information (U.S. based address), it was squawking about my zip code. Unlike when I ordered my shoes, I couldn't use a different browser with a proxy server from the U.S., because I was placing my order using this special utility provided by Microsoft.

Therefore, to work around this problem, I downloaded a free application called Pro XPN from this website which creates a virtual private network in the U.S. Once PRO XPN was turned on, I restarted the upgrade utility and competed my purchase.  Then I turned off PRO XPN and restarted the Microsoft upgrade utility and completed my download of Windows 8.

I have 2 packages in route from Amazon.com via Transexpress (call them Club Correos if you wish, but I make a distinction based on which U.S. based partner is doing the shipping to Ecuador) each weighing under 2 pounds. I was expecting to be charged $14.98 each, but due to the fact they have a separate calculation based on the dimensions of the package, I am being charged $17.98 and $15.98 respectively.

Since I was pissed off by this, I decided to call the alternative Club Correos courier in Miami, Econcargo and confirmed that they only charge based on weight, and if you compare this table with what Transexpress calculates based on weight, you see that they are identical.

Therefore, I have decided to drop Transexpress as my Club Correos courier and will be signing up with Econcargo. They seem to both have the same annual $10 fee. While the quality of the control panel at Transexpress' website seems better for tracking packages, if the delivery is just as reliable, I won't care.

P.S.
If you register online with EconCargo, the field for Cedula or Passport is looking for 10 digits. Since my passport number is 9 digits, they told me to put a zero in front of my passport number.

I plan to come to the states once a year to visit and for shopping so I will bring all need than that will work better for us.

I'm trying to figure out how to best handle my mail when we're in Cuenca less than full time.