Shipping to E.U countries just became harder and cost more $

Probably the best thing to do would be contact UK customs and ask if you can import what you're after.

Yeah, customs officials are notoriously ornery beasts the whole world over.

It might not be USPS themselves, but the national post offices USPS are handing the package off to - perhaps something like a legal requirement for an adult signature on delivery of swords that those local post offices aren't willing to guarantee but UPS, FedEx, etc. are? That would explain the shipments getting rejected in the destination country instead of in the US. It would also explain why some countries are affected and not others - regulations and the services provided by the national post office both vary from country to country.

The operative words of possibility here seems to be a manifest issue.  Over the years, descriptions such as "sporting goods"  "fencing equipment"  "decorative fill in the blank" etc seem to have raised fewer issues with carriers.  If the carriers are being tagged on either end of the ponds, it is a carrier "flag" that appears to be the issue.

Aside from calling each and every customs dept, it is the initial business and shipper that manifest the goods.

In a recent thread regarding the UK and mentioned here was a custom maker unable to ship from the UK.  We know this is an instance but Todeschini ships to the US without an issue.

We do have an erstwhile KOA rep posting here and perhaps he may be able to shed some light on the developing issues.

In fact, and this could be added as a subforum here at SBG is a designated area and pinned threads one can contribute to.  The legal issues as well, in the same subforum.  SFI and Bladeforums both have always had such rooms.  I'm not going to call out anyone in particular for "the sky is falling" postings and thread starters but as with this thread, discussion typically devolves to preaching to the choir and other disturbances that make a lot of white noise.

The noise to signal ratio is really important in discussing such issues and I hope the producers "manufacturers" and makers can pool their current and projected future shipment issues.  Individual sales and shipping will follow those leads.

There are two US resources that distributors should be aware of and participate in

www.akti.org/

kniferights.org/

Both the above are active at the legislative levels and your local politics and laws a part of the whole.  Be involved or let life evolve as you see it.

As an international community, it would behoove all to respect each other's laws without backbiting and whining.  I'll leave it at that except all should be aware and active in any legislation or decision by a private party (ie shippers, carriers et al)


Anyway, run "sporting goods" up the international flag pole but do clarify with shippers and carriers allow for any category one might list an item as.  Machetes are garden tools, right?

Do not quote this post unless you expect me to respond.  I didn't post it to bicker at all but I do point to the community at large to at least try to be civil in this matter.

with world interests
Glen Cleeton

There doesn't seem to be a ruling. That's part of the problem.

For me it looks like USPS or their air carrier has some problems with incorrectly declared swords in a few European countries (including Switzerland, which isn't in the EU) , goes the easy way and blames the EU. 

After talking with Ryan over at KoA, he has seen the same thing Ronin has and has moved to UPS shipping for the EU. He told me that in his talks with the USPS and his agents that the problem is air carriers to the EU are allowed to reject shipments that have weapons on them which is what's happening. Rejection causes an automatic return and consumption of postage. Shippers are out the postage costs and face long delays in getting packages back.

"Here is what I found out. These items are fine to import for most of the destinations we are shipping to. However, USPS has a policy that will allow the pilot of the flight containing the shipments to reject the packages for any reason...there does not seem to be any way to get your postage back when the USPS fails to provide the paid for service in these cases. After complaining to our Endicia rep, and various postal service reps to no avail, we simply stopped offering USPS as an option to Europe. I’m not willing to gamble with the postage for every shipment to Europe, so our business is just going to UPS."

So why would pilots reject sword and knife shipments to the EU? We can only speculate why unfortunately. Given when this started aggressively, in January of 2019, there is clearly a lot more to this than just pilots suddenly deciding to enforce their option to not transport weapons. My goods were labeled Historical Replica. You would need to open it or scan it to see what the package actually contained. In 15 years of shipping to the EU, this is the biggest problem I've encountered, and the losses are large enough that Ronin ended all shipments to the EU over it last week.

My personal opinion is that this is a soft ban. Someone has decided to see what will happen if packages get rejected and the postage is a total loss. Pilots could have had a meeting and decided they were going to change the world and reject packages, but that seems unlikely. My brother in law is a pilot for Delta and he says he could not care less about it as it would be time consuming and cause waves. And to that point, why were they given this right, and when? Is it EU pilots or all pilots? Logistically it makes no sense.

Again, I think this is by design. There is no need to change a single law when pressure can be applied and you can get the same result. I am not a citizen of the EU, and thus have no say in how things are done over there. I'm going to take the path of least resistance as I have to worry about profits. If I'm losing money every time I ship, I'm going to stop doing it. If that's in fact what the EU wants, they are going to see the traffic flow shift away from USPS and to private carriers which increases prices and decreases demand.

That's what I know. The facts are simply these; USPS has started aggressively rejecting packages with swords/knives. Dealers are either dropping the EU as a destination, or are switching to a more expensive carrier increasing costs for customers. Why? We can only speculate.

This might be something like what happened with starting pistols in Finland some time ago. They're perfectly legal to import and trade, requiring no licenses or permits of any kind as long as they can't be converted to actual firearms, but at one point some official or a handful of officials in Finnish customs just up and decided to interpret the law such that in practice anything could be converted to a firearm with enough work (in reality this would typically require replacing every single part of the device, meaning it would literally be easier to just build a gun from scratch). Nothing in the relevant laws or regulations had changed, but suddenly shipments of replica firearms and blank firing guns that were just fine before were being seized by customs. It took several years of legal battles to clear the mess, precisely because it was based on no official ruling and in fact no legal basis of any kind, just some officious busybodies overstepping their authority.

The problem has nothing to do with the EU because there are problems with some Not-EU countries and no problems with some EU countries. 
It's not a sword import ban because other companies can ship the swords.
A Pan-European carrier pilot conspiracy against USPS but not other US companies is hard to believe.