Government Customs Department is much Better. Review on DHL

Summary: If think DHL would take care of the hassles involved in International Shipping, then you are mistaken. They have not intention of guiding you through the process in case of any hiccups, and they don't say what is needed and what needs to be furnished. You might as well deal with the customs dept directly, I have dealt with customs in the past, they are much more reasonable and understanding than DHL staff.

Long Story:

I bought a Graphic Card from Amazon India, last year(2018). The card subsequently stop working, and I raised a RMA request with AMD India.

The approved my request, got my broken card and shipped a new one from Hong Kong.

Now, unfortunately it was shipped with DHL and instead of shipping to the service center and then shipping it to me, for some unfathomable reason they shipped directly to me.

Initially a woman from DHL contacted me to get the KYC details, she was polite and guided me through the whole process. I was happy so far and KYC was successfully submitted.

The nightmare started, when a "Clearance Specialist" named "Mark Donald .V " contacted me, who was supposed to be my liason to the Customs department. He said that the Card I RMAed is valued at a whopping "$6999" in India, now mind you, the card is being sold in India for Rs.59000/- right now, and even when I bought it last year it was sold for Rs 75000/-, I am pretty sure they missed a "." somewhere, it should be "$699.9" not "$6999", even when it was released it was officially sold in US for "$650".

Anyway, I furnished the Original Bill from Amazon Seller to them, and hoped this would sort it out.

But alas I was wrong, the Customs dept was looking for a letter from me to request lowering the estimated price. Now I have prior experience in drafting such a letter and I request the DHL team to tell what exactly should I provide, like for instance, should it be a "physical letter", " email" or a "scanned copy", also what are the information to be provided. He didn't answer any of my question, he simply replied he need a "letter".

I assumed a formal letter with details like bill number, rma number and product serial number along with the request to lower the amount would be suffice. So I drafted such a mail and sent it through email. This happened 20 days ago.

He replied last week asking me why I am getting the card to my home address while the bill has a office address. I explained that it was bought by my Brother in law and as given to me later.For this he asked me to draft and send another letter. So I sent him the same.

Now after 20 days, he said that these letters should contact my signature. This got me frustrated, because I asked him those questions earlier about the letter, because I wanted to avoid these kind of delays. I called the customer care, the support team blamed one because, they expect me to know what is needed in the letter.Had they mentioned to me that they needed a scanned letter, I would done so with a signature. Even so, they received my letter 20+ days ago, they had able time to respond to me that wasn't what they were looking for and needs some corrections.

Again, today I took a print of these letters, signed them, scanned them and sent it to them again. I just got an automated mail, no response as usual from the support team.But I wanted to make sure, I am not missing anything, so mailed them again to check my letter.

Only after that, they replied to me saying that the letter needs to contain "AWB" number as well. Again I had to do the whole print out and scanning process to sent the letter for the 4th time.

Even Indian Postal Service does a great job in Customs clearance, I have dealt with Postal Service and Customs department a few times, and I have to tell you, they are very polite reasonable and tell you exactly what documents are needed. These Clearance agents, seem to do nothing but sit on their desks and forward the mails between customs and customer.

My Shipment still hasn't cleared, and I am not sure if it ever will.