Back to news... 21 November 2025 UPS services to the USA temporarily disabled
Those of you that use WPS to regularly send shipments to the USA may have noticed recently that our UPS options have disappeared from our quote options. Unfortunately, in September the UPS USA customs department decided to start applying 200% duties on shipments that contain any metal, even the tiniest of amounts.
We were advised by UPS that US Customs now require a "Section 232 Steel and Aluminium" form to be attached to any package containing metal, declaring the value of the metal it contains and the country in which the metal was smelted. Obviously, having to fill out these forms has caused disruption and inconvenience to our customers, but not only that, doing so has not prevented all delays and inconsistent duty assessments from occurring, sometimes taking up to 8 weeks to resolve!
In addition to these disruptions, receivers have been understandably reluctant to pay these heavily inflated duties. In cases like this, UPS raise the query back to us. While we were able to correct some duty overcharges, many shipments ended up being returned to the sender instead of reaching their destination.
So, as we are sure you can now understand, we took the difficult decision to pause our UPS services to America until this ridiculous situation can be resolved.
DHL to the rescue
Fortunately for us and you, DHL have not been impacted by the same restrictions as UPS and so we are able to continue offering services to the USA at great prices. To soften the blow of losing some service options, we have also reduced our DHL prices by 10% to be more aligned to our UPS prices.
DHL also do not require the Section 232 form to be attached to parcels they ship to the USA, making their service more convenient for you, and to date we have not experienced any duty overcharges or customs delays via their services.
We sincerely hope this situation is resolved in the very near future and we can re-enable our UPS services to offer even more great options for our customers.




Customer Service: 020 8310 1362



