The online system has shown my order as "preparing to ship" or "shipping soon" for several days now. What's the delay?

Because shipping costs are a relatively high portion of the total cost when shopping at HLJ (especially when compared to buying from a mail-order store in your own country), we do our best to keep customer's shipping costs as low as possible. One way of doing that is by making fewer shipments of more items instead of several shipments of fewer items.

Our experience has shown that if we check for shippable orders every day, customers with multiple orders on our books tend to get multiple shipments close together, which of course raises shipping costs. To keep this to a minimum,we are now checking outstanding orders to see if they are shippable just two or three times per week.

Because of this, if you send us a shipping request, you should see this request reflected on the Online Order Status System within a day or so, but we won't actually begin processing your order for shipping until the next time we search our books to create a batch of shippable orders. Depending on when we receive your request, that could be anywhere from a day or two to one week, or in particularly busy periods, even more.

While this definitely slows down arrival of your order, it will keep the number of shipments to you to a minimum, and we think most customers will prefer that in the long run.