Shipping – Important Information regarding shipments – October 2024

Germany

Deliveries inside Germany – where we are based – are largely unaffected by recent developments in the logistics industry. But there are a few changes.

Books/Magazines

The shipping price for smaller book orders has been scrapped by Deutsche Post. The old books tariff (“Büchersendung”) doesn’t exist anymore. The “Warensendung” now covers any weight up to 1kg, meaning books below 500g are no longer cheaper to send.

Book orders (from our own shop or booklooker.de are shipped as Warensendung via Deutsche Post at € 3.00.

Copies of Datacide (and certain other publications, including many new books) include free shipping. This is reflected in the cover price when ordered directly from the Praxis Shop.

Note that the “Warensendung” does not automatically include tracking.

All orders for € 49.00 or more are FREE by default. These are sent with a service such as Hermes, GLS or DPD and do include full tracking.

Records and other larger orders

Records inside Germany are being sent on a nearly daily basis with services such as Hermes, GLS or DPD.

We now charge a flat rate of € 6.00, regardless of the size of your order. The reason this is up from the previous € 5.00 flat rate is not so much the shipping cost. But the fact that packaging material has gotten more expensive and that we generally use more study/expensive cartons than before.

Currently you get FREE SHIPPING from a total order value of only € 49.00 or more.

Flat rate for orders on discogs.com is now € 6.50. The reason for this is that Discogs is now charging their fee not just on the records, but also on the cost of shipment. For orders on Discogs you get FREE SHIPPING for orders of a total of € 99.00 or more.

International shipments – Europe and Rest of the World

From the time Praxis moved back to Berlin in 2007 until 2020, shipping records internationally was mostly easy, straightforward and cheap. The price for overseas shipments even dropped significantly at one point!

However the Covid pandemic threw this system into disarray and developments – some of which unrelated to the pandemic – changed things considerably.

Even before Covid hit, Deutsche Post no longer allowed merchandise to be included in letter post and first created a special professional service at the same cost. But in spring 2020 everything ground to a halt when air traffic more or less stopped. To make the long story short, DP ended up greatly reducing the options which primarily affects smaller companies and made everything much more expensive.

A number of smaller companies and shipment brokers came to fill the void.

The one we chose to work with is Asendia a company geared towards smaller and mid-sized B2C businesses. Asendia is a collaboration of the French postal service La Poste and the Swiss postal service Swisspost,

Asendia has proven a good solution which allowed us to largely maintain fairly low shipping prices. However, they don’t run their own network of shops and we have to send a large package containing several orders to their hub near Frankfurt airport.

For this we have to use a different company (DPD/DHL/GLS/Hermes).

In concrete terms this means the procedure of mailing out a typical order is as follows:

• Order comes in.
• Order is checked and compiled.
• If all items are in stock (or if it makes sense to send a part of the order) the order is packed. An Asendia tracking code is generated and communicated to the customer.
• Roughly 8-12 orders are collected and sent in a large box to the Asendia warehouse.
• Once the box arrives there, orders are separated, the tracking codes are scanned and the single orders sent to their respective destinations.
• Ideally all these steps only take a few days combined, but – depending on how many orders come in and how efficient the initial transport to Asendia is – in the worst case each step can take several days.
• This can lead to frustrating delays in some cases, but overall we think this is still the best solution taking prices and delivery times into account.

Alternative options:

• Inside the EU we can also use DPD, GLS, or Hermes. Generally we use these as a default for orders of over 2kg, but they can also be used for smaller orders.
• For a small order the price is higher than sending with Asendia, but we don’t have to collect orders, hence some of the delays can be avoided.
• Outside of the EU the only other option is DHL which can get quite expensive, but is safe and reliable for world-wide deliveries.

Just ask us!