International Shipping FAQ

In the case of the 27 member states of the EU, for orders under 150 Euros, VAT will be charged on our site and remitted directly via the IOSS system. If VAT is charged on your order on our site, there will not be additional charges of any kind. VAT varies by country, but it is usually around the 20% range.

For EU orders over 150 Euros, our site will not charge VAT and there will be clearance fees (including VAT, duty and a clearance fee) charged upon entry to the EU. Please do not place orders to the EU for over 150 Euros unless you are okay with these import fees because it is quite an administrative hassle for everyone involved if these fees are not paid.

This is to comply with laws put in place by the EU as of July 1 2021 — we did not determine the 150 Euro amount.

In the case of sub 135GBP orders, the 20% UK VAT will be charged on our store and we will remit it directly to HMRC. This means that you will no long have COD VAT or processing/clearance fees as as long as your order is under 135GBP. In addition, orders should proceed to delivery more quickly than prior to this system being put in place.

However, if your order goes over 135GBP then our store will not collect VAT and you will have to pay VAT (20%), duty (rates vary) and a clearance fee (typically in the 8-10GBP range) upon arrival to the UK. Please do not place orders to the UK for over 135GBP unless you are okay with these import fees because it is quite an administrative hassle for everyone involved if these fees are not paid.

This is to comply with laws put in place by the UK as of Jan 1 2021 — we did not determine the 135GBP amount.

It depends on your country and the amount. If you’re in the EU and the order is over 150 Euros, you will have customs charges — some combination of VAT, duty, clearance fees, etc. Even within the EU, fees will differ from country to country, so you should be familiar with your country’s laws before ordering. However, if the VAT is charged on our site, then you will not pay any additional import/customs/VAT/etc fees upon delivery.

In some countries like Hong Kong and Singapore, the duty limits are pretty high and taxes are less likely. For instance, in Singapore, the duty limit is S$400 — below this, taxes are typically not charged as far as we know. In places like Australia and Canada the duty limits are also fairly high so fees are possible but only highly likely on more expensive shipments.

In pretty much any country, there is some point at which import fees will kick in, but that amount differs so it ultimately depends on the country you’re shipping to. Please note that our shipping cost does not cover these import charges.

It is a bit of a myth that you don’t have to pay taxes on a shipment declared as a gift. While it is true that some countries have higher duty limits for gifts, usually you will still have to pay import charges for a gift. The other problem is that it’s not legal to do this so we can’t participate in this sort of process. If you want to ship the items to a friend in the USA and have them ship to you as a gift, go for it, but we can’t get involved. And like we said at the start of the answer, this is not some magic bullet to avoid all charges, customs agencies are smarter than that.

For the 44 countries where we ship via UPS Priority Mail Innovations, we have a tier system based on weight. This means the shipping cost will range from $8-20. We have tiers at $8 (up to 200g), $10 (201-400g), $12 (401-600g), $14 (601-800g) and then $20 (unlimited weight). Some countries also have some different shipping rates but what is listed in the prior sentence applies to the vast majority of our int’l shipments.

Yes. Orders of $100 or more qualify for free shipping. Simply use promo code hookgrip at checkout — it should pop up if you’re eligible. However, some exclusions apply, including: Romaleos, Anta, ATG hoodies and thumb tape. Due to the size, weight and profit margins of these items, we cannot offer free shipping.

It’s also important to note that free shipping online applies to orders shipped via UPS Priority Mail Innovations, our normal economy shipping service. We currently ship via UPS Priority Mail Innovations to 44 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macao, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom.

Just send us an email at support@hookgrip.com, with your name and order number, and let us know that you wanted to use the free shipping code. If your order qualifies, we can refund the shipping cost.

We can only ship these shoes to the Americas (all of North, Central and South America), European Economic Zone (including UK & Ireland), New Zealand and Australia. The reason for these restrictions is due to our contract with ANTA. If you are outside of these countries, the store will not let you checkout with them in your cart. One solution can be to ship to a friend or a forwarding company in the USA — once we ship the shoes to a USA address, you can have them sent to a country that we cannot ship to under the terms of our contract.

It is extremely difficult for us to be able to give specific sizing advice to anyone unsure of their size. While we understand that you want to get the right size when ordering, feet have lots of different shapes, and some people prefer a tighter fit, while others want a loose fit. One possible measurement gauge to use is that the ANTAs that we sell fit very similarly to the Romaleo 2s. We also have some youtube videos (here and here) that can help you see the sizes compared to other weightlifting shoes.

Generally, no. This is a matter of it being prohibitively expensive for both parties, along with packages taking significant amounts of time to return to us, among other issues. Please be as sure as possible in regards to sizing before placing an order. There are some cases where we can do exchanges but it is fairly rare and is generally limited to Canada or places with cheaper non-USA shipping and limited-to-zero customs/taxes.

Unfortunately we don’t ship to every country, but we ship to most countries that participate regularly in int’l weightlifting. Most of the excluded countries do not generally have many customers placing orders anyway — there are only a few countries where people routinely want to place orders but we can’t ship to them. The reasons for being excluded mostly revolve around shipment delivery problems and bad local mail services. If you don’t see a payment method at checkout, you are located in a country we are currently not shipping to. However, if you still want to place an order, contact us at support@hookgrip.com and we will work with you as best as possible.

Yes, and if you are located in a country with notorious mail/delivery problems, we actually prefer it, especially if the address is U.S. based. However, be aware that once the package is delivered to the forwarding address, it becomes that company’s responsibility.

So the way our DHL Express rates work is they are for more urban areas. It’s basically areas that DHL Express serves regularly. For our normal shipments, they are usually being delivered by the national post, which cover all areas, so there is not any differentiation between remote areas and urban areas. But with DHL Express, there is a difference. If you want to check to see if you’re in an area that DHL Express considers remote, you can check the following PDF: DHL Express Remote Area List.

So if you place an order with us and select DHL Express and you’re in a remote area, we will email you with the updated charges. Sometimes these charges are high, sometimes they aren’t. It all depends on your country, how big the package is, etc. If you want, you can opt to cancel the order. Unfortunately we don’t have a good way to program these charges into our checkout process because the automatic DHL rate calculators don’t work well on our software and manually programming every postal code in is beyond something we can reasonably do — especially when the charges are different in every country.

That being said, if you’re in a major city or near a major city, this should not be a factor in your DHL Express pricing — aka the price at our checkout will be correct.

If you need to make a change to your order, such as switching something to a different size, or adding/removing an item, please contact us as soon as possible. If you wait until your order has already been shipped and has left our warehouse, there is nothing that we can do to adjust it. We cannot recall, redirect or cancel any packages in transit.

Yes, as long as your order hasn’t already left our warehouse. Changes cannot be made to addresses after they have been picked up.

Check your order confirmation email after ordering, and if you see any mistakes, contact us immediately. Just reply to your order email as that will come to our support@hookgrip.com shared inbox. But as stated in the prior question, if your order has been picked up from our warehouse, we cannot make any changes.

Generally around 48 hours, not including weekends. This means an order on a Monday is likely to ship by Wednesday. But an order on a Friday is likely to ship by Tuesday. This varies depending on our order volume, and is in no way a guarantee in either direction — at slower times, orders ship within a matter of a few hours and during busy times orders can take over 2 business days. During our peak holiday season (November through December), orders will almost certainly take more than 48 hours to ship, so please try to be patient before contacting us.

Yes. You will receive an automatic email from us with your tracking number once the shipping label for your order has been printed. If it’s been awhile since ordering and you haven’t received an email, please first check your spam folder before contacting us. We generally find that hotmail, msn, outlook and live (anything microsoft) tend to go to junk/spam. Most other major providers like gmail generally do not put our emails into the spam folder.

If you pay extra for DHL Express at checkout, then DHL Express will complete the final delivery. However, if you opt for the other options, your order will leave our warehouse as UPS Priority Mail Innovations.

With UPS Priority Mail Innovations the delivery is mostly done by the local post in the country. Typically the package is transported to the destination country by UPS Priority Mail Innovations (or contractors for them) and then once the package arrives in the destination country, it is transferred to the local post. So final delivery will mostly be done by whatever national post organization is in charge in the destination country.

Some examples of this include: Royal Mail (UK), Aus Post (Australia), Canada Post (Canada), La Poste (France), Poste Italiane (Italy), Correos (Spain), PostNL (Netherlands), Poczta Polska (Poland), Bpost (Belgium), etc.

In general, you will be able to figure out the final delivery company by looking at your tracking page and looking at the local tracking number.

No, nothing is wrong. Currently (April. 2023), our international pickups occur every Monday and Thursday. If you receive a tracking number on a Friday, your order is not actually leaving our warehouse until Monday afternoon; the tracking will start to show progress once the package arrives at the UPS Priority Mail Innovations warehouse.

Delivery time depends on many factors like which country you are located in, mail volume, and the time of year the package is shipped. At the time of writing (April 2023), here are some of our recent delivery times to a few international destinations:

• Australia: Averaged 19 days, with a low of 10 days, and high of 27 days
• Canada: Averaged 9 days, with a low of 6 days, and high of 16 days
• France: Averaged 10 days, with a low of 7 days, and high of 14 days
• Singapore: Averaged 12 days, with a low of 8 days, and high of 15 days
• Spain: Averaged 16 days, with a low of 10 days, and high of 18 days
• UK: Averaged 10 days, with a low of 9 days, and high of 12 days

Please note that these days are counted from the time when the package was processed at the UPS Priority Mail Innovations warehouse in New York. Packages are generally processed within 48 hours of being picked up at our warehouse.

We don’t maintain these sorts of lists for all countries because the information is, for the most part, not very relevant.

• Firstly, these times should not be relied upon for anything with a tight deadline. It’s not safe to assume that any package would be faster than the “high” timeline. It’s likely to be faster, but there are no guarantees on timelines with services like UPS Priority Mail Innovations.
• Secondly, these times vary wildly depending on the time of year. The holiday season often sees transit times double for some countries. For instance, in December 2019 we saw Italy basically shut down their customs processing around mid December and lots of packages from early December didn’t get delivered until January. But packages sent in mid November were arriving around 2-3 weeks after being sent. Another example is that a lot of countries had massive slowdowns in April-May of 2020 because of COVID related problems both in processing and in air transport between countries. These sorts of slowdowns are impossible for us to know about or predict so we don’t want to quote a customer something like 10-20 days and have 20 days come and go without delivery.

The good news is that UPS Priority Mail Innovations is generally quite quick, economical and reliable to the countries that we ship to using that service. We’ve eliminated the ones where the local post is a problem. So you stand a very good chance of getting your order in sub 3 weeks in most countries, but we can’t promise a timeline or guarantee.

Once the shipping label for your order has been printed, you will receive an automatic email from us which will contain the UPS Priority Mail Innovations tracking information. It will be a series of 17-18 numbers. You’ll need to copy and paste this number into http://ups.com/track to track your package. Make sure that your pasted data doesn’t have any spaces at the start or end of the number as that can cause some issues with the tracking working. You will need to use this tracking information to obtain your local tracking number; it’s not something we can automatically send you because it’s not available when we print the shipping label — it’s assigned by UPS Priority Mail Innovations at their warehouse.

The local tracking number won’t be available until the package is received and processed at the UPS Priority Mail Innovations facility in New York. Typically it will be noted as Edgewood, NY on the tracking history. The first status you’ll see is “ORDER INFORMATION RECEIVED” which is the default status from the time that we print the shipping label until the package actually arrives in the UPS Priority Mail Innovations facility. The second status you’ll probably see is “PACKAGE RECEIVED FOR PROCESSING” which is then usually followed by “PACKAGE PROCESSED.” The local tracking number will be assigned at the time you see the “PACKAGE PROCESSED” tracking status. At this point you’ll be able to see the local number if you click “View Details” on the UPS website. The local tracking number will be listed under the heading “Alternate Tracking Number(s).”

You can use this number on your country’s local post website to access more accurate tracking details. However, the number will not work until the item is actually physically received in the destination country. Sometimes the transit process from the USA to the destination country can entail a few weeks of relatively little tracking visibility. This is more common during busier time periods or countries with less international mail volume. For example, even though Malta and Italy are located near each other, we always see slower shipping times to Malta than we do with packages to Italy. This time discrepancy is simply because Malta has lower mail volume than Italy and because trucking over land is faster/easier/cheaper than transport from European sort centers to an island like Malta.

They will typically go in this sort of order:

• ORDER INFORMATION RECEIVED: Happens at the time the label is generated.
• PACKAGE RECEIVED FOR PROCESSING: Happens when the package arrives at the processing warehouse. This can take anywhere from several hours to several days from the time you get your email. It all depends on how your shipment syncs with our pickups.
• PACKAGE PROCESSED: Depending on how busy processing centers are, this usually happens several hours or days after arriving at the distribution center.
• PACKAGE ARRIVED AT/DEPARTED INTERNATIONAL CARRIER (USA): Typically this happens 1-3 days after it’s marked Processed.

After those first four is when things become quite different from country to country. In many instances, tracking will proceed something like this, after the above four statuses occur:

• PACKAGE PROCESSED BY INTERNATIONAL CARRIER (DESTINATION COUNTRY)
• PACKAGE ARRIVED AT/DEPARTED FOREIGN CUSTOMS OFFICE
• PACKAGE ARRIVED AT/DEPARTED INTERNATIONAL CARRIER (DESTINATION COUNTRY)
• DELIVERED OR DELIVERED BY LOCAL POST OFFICE 

Depending on the item and the country, you may see customs related statuses mixed in there. Something like “HELD BY CUSTOMS“, “CLEARED CUSTOMS“, etc are common to see in the mix after “PACKAGE ARRIVED AT FOREIGN CUSTOMS OFFICE“. It’s also fairly common to see statuses missing or to see statuses twice. For instance, some countries don’t do the “PACKAGE PROCESSED BY INTERNATIONAL CARRIER [DESTINATION COUNTRY]” status but you’ll just see two or three “PROCESSED BY INTERNATIONAL CARRIER” with various locations listed. However, generally, you can expect to see some or all of the above in some reasonably similar list/order.

The timeline for these statuses varies wildly. Most commonly shipped to countries will see “PACKAGE PROCESSED BY INTERNATIONAL CARRIER [DESTINATION COUNTRY]” just a few days or maybe a week after “PACKAGE ARRIVED AT INTERNATIONAL CARRIER [USA]“. Some others won’t see an update for several weeks.

Yes, it is real. As stated at the top of this page, many packages are subject to these additional costs which include: VAT, duty, processing fees, etc. Every country has a customs clearance process and the costs and requirements vary widely. If you’re in a country with these fees, there’s a good chance your government will impose them. This is not something we can stop them from doing, unfortunately. Our shipping fee does not include these charges and anything owed is not collected by hookgrip. It’s important to be aware of the laws in your country before ordering from outside of the country (or outside of your customs zone, in the case of the EU).

You will need to contact your local carrier as soon as possible, referencing your local tracking number (see above for how to get your local tracking number). Don’t use the UPS Priority Mail Innovations tracking number in the original email from our store as local carriers will not use that number. Packages are not delivered for a variety of reasons, including that customs are owed, or the recipient wasn’t home at the time of the attempt. Contacting the carrier is really the only way to figure out what is going to happen with your package. Often times, you can reschedule another delivery attempt, or have the package held to be picked up at a local retail point. It’s important to do this pretty quickly as packages often have a 10-20 day period where they will be held before being marked “Return to Sender” and shipped back to us.

Packages that go unclaimed are marked return to sender, and once designated, are often very difficult to get delivered instead of being sent back. Sometimes you can get a post office to deliver a package after being marked return to sender but you have to be fast as once the package is sent back the local post office can’t get it back. Packages can be marked unclaimed if: it is refused at the time of delivery for any reason, never picked up from a post office/retail point, or customs charges go unpaid. This is the importance of watching your local tracking number carefully. Packages that are returned to us often take a minimum of a few months to actually get back to us, and there’s really nothing we can do with your order until that point. Letting your package go unclaimed will create a hassle spanning many months so we recommend keeping a close eye on your tracking number.

It’s important to act quickly on this. If it says delivered 3 weeks ago and you simply forgot about the order then chances of recovery are slim. But if it says delivered 1-2 days ago, you can often followup with your local post or mail delivery person and generally the package will be tracked down quickly. Sometimes it’s as simple as the mail delivery person put it in a location you’re not used to, left it with a neighbor or similar. However, we do sometimes see packages marked as delivered in the morning and then not actually delivered until later in the day. This is not common but it does happen so if you see something like a 6am delivered status, more likely than not, you will see the package later that day. But please follow up with your local post office (with the local tracking number) and contact us afterwards if they cannot locate it.