Email is required by DHL and seller. The order was 900 euros. I have been ordering from that supplier for years without any problems. Delivery was always within 5 days. I thought it’s safe if I received it before Oct 22. My only hope now is that I can get a refund.
Update: keep corresponding with DHL, filled out another 4 page form and got a letter saying that if it does not clear before Oct 24, DHL will start charging me $31/day for storage…
I guess it’s OK to import banned diesel and not OK to get skin fillers for personal use.
I got a tracking number from Maulik on 10/1. No tracking shown after being in Mumbai on 10/8.
I was about to pull the trigger on a couple more orders, but I have decided to wait to see some progress… that was my largest order and I was already nervous about putting that all in one package and losing $$$
If you made it to Queens you should be good because that should be after customs. Might just be lost in the shuffle there for a bit.
I had two packages through there last week that both lost their delivery date when spending too much time in Jamaica before Queens. Estimated delivery dates reappeared when they made it to a local hub by my house. I don’t put much faith in the accuracy of the tracking between the time it leaves Mumbai and his my local hub. It seems like chaos reigns in the middle.
Might not be reassuring, but I had 6 to 7 days between my most recent packages leaving Mumbai and arriving for a customs scan. If you use something like 17track or India Post tracking you can see when it actually gets on an aircraft and lands in the states.
Of the two packages I had last week, the one that was sent a day earlier spent two days longer at the Mumbai airport before getting on a plane.
I use India Post and USPS tracking. Mine shows clearly the India airport departure time and the arrival time in the US, but for four days, the system has treated it as if it were arriving but shows no progress since the Queens station on the 13th.
On the India side, it was 6-7 days at airport limbo before a departure time showed up.
The Queens facility is a known problem spot. The 2016 USPS OIG audit found it had the highest delayed-mail rate in the entire country — 28% of mailpieces delayed vs. a ~0.5% national average. The root cause was chronic undercapacity: the facility was receiving roughly 82,000 more packages per day than its machines could process.
For international packages specifically , 6 days is on the lower end of what people report. A recent expert answer (published yesterday) states it’s “common for packages to remain at the Jamaica NY facility for several days to two weeks , particularly with international shipments.”
What Reddit threads show is a consistent pattern:
4–7 days stuck: very common, multiple threads per year
2–3 weeks: also common, especially during peak season (Nov–Jan)
1–2 months: less common but not rare, often involving high-value items
One user reported a package stuck for 3 weeks before it finally moved
Why it’s so frequent at Queens specifically:
It’s the primary entry point for international mail heading to the tri-state area and beyond
It handles customs handoff and domestic sorting in one facility
It has historically lacked the machine capacity for its volume
It’s a known theft hotspot for high-value packages (per multiple user reports)
So your 6-day stall is frustrating but squarely within the range of what Queens routinely produces. The fact that it’s an international package coming through customs makes it even more expected. The package is far more likely to be sitting in a Gaylord container or on a misrouted truck than to be lost — but the follow-up steps from before are still the right move at day 6.
I’ve had packages pass through CBP in NY and the Queens Distribution Center from as little as two days up to about two weeks. And, sometimes they would miraculously appear at my local post office through USPS Tracking with intermediate tracking steps all suddenly appearing at the same time. Whatever the reasons, I have no idea.
Yes, waiting until all packages have cleared before placing new orders seems logical. That’s what I do. I’m currently waiting for a vendor to provide a tracking number that I expected to receive last week.
I wonder if vendors are being flooded with so many orders that they simply can’t process them quickly enough, but that’s pure speculation on my part. Could this result in a possible triple whammy due to increased orders from the US, leading to: 1) slower vendor processing, 2) slower shipping to the US via India Post, and 3) slower customs processing? Again, this is all pure speculation.
@JPEsquire@Jay called it! After the 17th delivery date came and went, the last tracking update as of 30 minutes ago was still Queens on the 13th. I was just notified that the parcel is at my local PO, out for delivery today. Still no backfill on tracking though.
My parcels come signature required but in the past year, the postman has just been putting them in the mailbox.
