International Shipping FAQ

It depends on your country. If you’re in the EU, more than likely, 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.

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. However, many countries in Europe have limits around 15-20 Euros before fees start to be charged.

In pretty much any country, there is some point at which import fees will kick in, but that amount differs. So it really depends on the country you’re shipping to. Our shipping does not cover these import charges. At the time of writing, we are currently looking into better options for increased transparency in the customs process.

In the UK (no longer in the EU), you will not have any additional import charges for orders below 135GBP.
The 135GBP limit only applies to goods in the cart but VAT is also chargable on shipping costs. In the case of those 135GBP or less of goods orders, the 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 of goods. 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. This should greatly simplify the import fee process for the UK for orders under 135GBP.

This 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. But 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.

Our shipping prices are determined by total item weight at checkout. Up to 400g will be a flat rate of $6. Anything over this weight will be $20. There are some exceptions for things like ANTAs and Romaleos but those prices apply to the vast majority of orders.

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 DHL Global Mail, our normal economy shipping service. We don’t offer free shipping for countries where we only ship DHL Express. We currently ship via DHL Global Mail to 44 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, 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.

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.

We typically ship outside of the USA using DHL Global Mail, which is a discounted division of DHL. It isn’t as fast as their premium product, DHL Express. And DHL Express Customer Service does not deal with DHL Global Mail shipments — you shouldn’t directly contact DHL Express with your tracking number as they will have no idea what you’re talking about. DHL Global Mail, while slower than premium-cost express services, does have end-to-end tracking for every country that we ship to.

In recent weeks (at the time of this update in November 2020), we have added DHL Express for most international destinations where we have any semblance of a customer base and where DHL Express can reliably ship to.

If you pay extra for DHL Express at checkout, then DHL Express will do the final delivery. However, if you opt for the $6, $20 or free shipping options, your order will leave our warehouse as DHL Global Mail (a completely separate division not connected to the DHL Express division).

With DHL Global Mail, the delivery is mostly done by the local post in the country. Typically the package is transported to the destination country by DHL Global Mail (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.

There are a few exceptions. With Mexico, our deliveries will actually be delivered by DHL Express. This is just how DHL Global Mail handles Mexico, it’s still going out the door with the same packages as our items going to the rest of the world. Another exception, sometimes, is Japan. While most shipments are delivered by Japan Post, we have seen some be delivered by Sagawa.

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 (Oct 2020), our international pickups occur every Tuesday and Friday. If you receive a tracking number on a Wednesday, your order is not actually leaving our warehouse until Friday afternoon and tracking will start to show progress once the package arrives at the DHL Global Mail warehouse.

Delivery time is dependent on many factors, but mostly on which country you are located in. At the time of writing (Oct 2020), here are some examples of delivery time over the last 10 orders to a few international destinations:

• Australia: Averaged 16 days, with a low of 11 days, and high of 22 days
• Canada: Averaged 9 days, with a low of 7 days, and high of 13 days.
• France: Averaged 8 days, with a low of 6 days, and high of 11 days.
• Sweden: Averaged 16 days, with a low of 13 days, and high of 21 days.

One important note is that these days are counted from the time when the package was processed at the DHL Global Mail warehouse in northern New Jersey. Typically packages are 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 lists/times cannot 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 safe to assume that it’s likely to be faster, but there are no guarantees on timelines with services like DHL Global Mail.
• 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 DHL Global Mail 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.

You will receive an automatic email from us once the label for your order has been printed, which will contain the DHL Global Mail tracking information. It will start with GM and then have 18 numbers. You’ll need to copy and paste this number — including the GM part — into https://www.logistics.dhl or https://webtrack.dhlglobalmail.com. They both show the same information, just organized a bit differently on the page. 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 these pages to obtain your local tracking number as it’s not something we can automatically send you as it’s not available at the time of shipment label generation — it’s assigned by DHL Global Mail at their warehouse.

The local tracking number won’t be available until the package is received and processed at the DHL Global Mail facility in northern New Jersey. Typically it will be noted as Avenel, NJ on the tracking. The first status is typically “PACKAGE RECEIVED AT DHL ECOMMERCE DISTRIBUTION CENTER” and the second is usually “PROCESSED” within 24 hours of the first status. Prior to this, the package will simply say “EN ROUTE TO DHL ECOMMERCE DISTRIBUTION CENTER” which is the default status from the time that we print the label until the package actually gets to the DHL Global Mail facility. The local tracking number will be assigned at the time you see the “PROCESSED” tracking status. At this point you’ll be able to see the local number on the right side of the https://webtrack.dhlglobalmail.com website under two other numbers (DHL eCommerce and Customer Confirmation). Usually the local number will say something like “Delivery by [something]” above it. Examples include:

• Delivery by USPS Int’l (will typically start with LX and end with US)
• Delivery by Postal provider (will typically end with DE), etc.

You can also get it under the “More Shipment Details” accordion slider on the https://www.logistics.dhl website.

You can use this number on your local post website to get more accurate tracking details. However, the number often 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. As an example, when we ship to Malta, we always see a slower process here than when we ship to Italy, even though they are right next to each other. 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:

• EN ROUTE TO DHL ECOMMERCE DISTRIBUTION CENTER: Happens at the time the label is generated.
• PACKAGE RECEIVED AT DHL ECOMMERCE DISTRIBUTION CENTER: 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.
• PROCESSED: This usually happens several hours after arriving at the distribution center.
• PROCESSING COMPLETED AT ORIGIN: 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:

• ARRIVAL IN COUNTRY [DESTINATION COUNTRY]
• PROCESSED AT LOCAL DISTRIBUTION CENTER
• DEPARTED FROM LOCAL DISTRIBUTION CENTER
• DELIVERED

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 “ARRIVAL IN COUNTRY [DESTINATION COUNTRY]“. It’s also fairly common to see statuses missing or to see statuses twice. For instance, some countries don’t do the “ARRIVAL IN COUNTRY [DESTINATION COUNTRY]” status but you’ll just see two or three “PROCESSED AT LOCAL DISTRIBUTION CENTER” 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 is wildly variant. Most commonly shipped to countries will see “ARRIVAL IN COUNTRY [DESTINATION COUNTRY]” just a few days or maybe a week after “PROCESSING COMPLETED AT ORIGIN“. Some others won’t see an update for several weeks. Additionally, some countries will see a transit through Germany on their tracking as DHL has lots of facilities in Germany and it’s more efficient and cheaper for them to route a lot of shipments through there.

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 DHL Global Mail 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, you can reschedule another delivery attempt for a more convenient time, 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 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.