To United States Postal Service and Universal Postal Union: Tracking international packages from Ukraine

This petition is to be sent to USPS and copied to Universal Postal Union.

Why are we addressing these organizations?

USPS intiated changes that will have a negative impact on customer service, on international families and online sellers who ship to and receive international mail in US. It is especially bad, that changes were made without warning and in the beginning of the holiday season.

Universal Postal Union ( UPU ) sets the rules for international mail exchanges and makes recommendations to stimulate growth in mail, parcel and financial services volumes and improve quality of service for customers. According to UPU statute, it forms the united space for mutual postal exchange between the countries who are its members. Every member must process the mail of other members with use of adequate technologies that apply to its own mail.

Dear USPS services,
We are kindly asking you to reсonsider your decision on Tracking suppression for Import Registered mail.

Dear UPU!
We are seeking your assistance to solve the problem of tracking the imported registered mail from Ukraine in the US.

Who we are?

We are a community of Ukrainian artists, crafters and online sellers who work onEtsy.com and other international venues, with over 50% of our sales going to private customers in US.
We work hard in our personal art studios and small family workshops to create handcrafted goods and make some additional income. In today's economic situation in Ukraine online sales help us make living for our families and children. We ship several thousand parcels of sold goods to the customers in your country, and we are sending you this request due to the continuous problems with deliveries to the US.

What is the issue?

Registered airmail tracking numbers (with barcodes) do not appear in your tracking systems. Our local postal services only allow us to track up until leaving the country. If USPS continues to not scan the tracking numbers the packages will simply disappear. We don't even receive a message stating that it has arrived to the US.

We need tracking of our packages as a proof for our customers and for the site administration that the item was shipped. Only orders with provided tracking make us liable to the sellers protection programs if we have lost packages, returns or cases opened by buyers. Delivery from Europe to the US takes longer than inside the country and most of the customers will not feel secure if they have to wait too long and can not track their orders.
Hence, they will turn away from buying from Europe and from Ukraine in particular. If we lose customers, it will result in USPS losing many international customers too.

USPS states that some countries registered airmail packages do not have barcodes. Ukrainian post ( Ukrposhta ) has been very fast, reliable and effective during the last few years. We tell this from our experience. Ukrainian post registered airmail packages have barcodes. The postage fees we pay for these packages are already very high, compared to average income of Ukrainian citizen. Depending on the US dollar rate these fees get recalculated every day. We think we are already paying for the service including tracking. We understand that your organization wishes to raise more funds but we do pay for the highest possibly form of shipping our local postal services offers.

We already have to deal with claims, refunds and negative feedbacks from our US customers, because their orders were not trackable.
Many packaged sent from Ukraine in the end of September and beginning of October are already not trackable, which is not fair. Items sent before the new changes took place should be trackable because this service was included in what we payed for.

What do we want? Just simple questions answered:

How will we know when the recipient receives the package?

How will we know if the recipient signed for it?

How will we know if a notice has been left or unclaimed?

How will we know it there is a delay?

How can you confirm that the packages will still be delivered within 14 days? It will most likely take longer.

What do we ask:

Please, include Ukraine in the list of the countries that allow tracking by USPS for International registered mail.

We would kindly ask you to reinstate the registered airmail tracking system. Scan packages as soon as they arrive in the US. Would like this information to appear on your web site so that all your customers could have access to this information. If this information does not appear USPS will inevitably receive thousands of customer services complaints.

We would like all our clients to have a clear understanding that our packages have actually left original countries and are waiting to be processed in one of your sorting facilities on the US territory.

USPS also needs to revaluate their list of the countries that are still tracked by USPS as many countries who do have barcodes are not listed.

We really hope for your understanding and cooperation.

Thank you very much for your time,

From Ukrainian online sellers, self employed small business people, crafters, and of course many thanks from our customers in the US.