Send parcel to Vietnam

Who ships from Italy to Vietnam?

Few people remember it, but for years Italy was one of the European countries with the highest number of adoptions from Vietnam. Today a generation of adult Italian-Vietnamese maintains ties with siblings, aunts, uncles and home villages, and from Bologna, Milan and Treviso a steady flow of family parcels heads to the small towns of the Mekong and the North. Alongside this runs industrial Vietnam: Italian leather goods, footwear and furniture brands produce in plants near Ho Chi Minh City and Hai Phong, and the headquarters in Veneto and Tuscany ship samples, hides, fittings and prototypes weekly. Completing the picture are Italian professionals living in Vietnam (architects, designers, managers in textile and leather) who receive from Italy everything that is still hard to find in Saigon.

Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City: and can the diacritics be simplified?

Both can be written on the parcel: "Ho Chi Minh City", "Hồ Chí Minh" or even just "Saigon" are all understood and arrive at destination. The official name changed in 1976, but "Saigon" has remained in the everyday usage of southern Vietnamese, especially the older generations, and even in the IATA code of the airport (SGN). The same applies to tonal accents and the typical Vietnamese characters (ă, â, ê, ô, ơ, ư, đ): they can be simplified without any problem. "Da Nang" works as well as "Đà Nẵng", "Hue" as well as "Huế". What really matters for routing is the six-digit postcode and the district.

How do you write an address in Vietnam?

The address follows a reverse order compared to the Italian one: recipient's name, house number and street, ward (phường), district (quận), city and six-digit postcode. Example: "Trần Thị Lan, 142 Đường Nguyễn Huệ, Phường Bến Nghé, Quận 1, Hồ Chí Minh 700000, VIETNAM". Ho Chi Minh City starts with 7, Hanoi with 1, Da Nang with 5. In Vietnam delivery is almost always done by motorbike, and in the larger cities the district (Quận) is the central piece of information for the courier: without a clear Quận, even GPS gets lost. Always add the recipient's phone number with the +84 prefix, because the driver calls before going up to the upper floors of condominiums or entering the narrowest alleys, the hẻm of Saigon.

From Milan to Hanoi, from Milan to Saigon: do delivery times change?

Vietnam stretches 1,650 km from north to south, and delivery times reflect this geography. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are the two main hubs, with the fastest and most predictable times: generally 7 to 10 working days from Italy. Da Nang, Hue and the other coastal cities of the centre add an average of one or two days. For the Mekong Delta (Cần Thơ, My Tho) and the mountain provinces of the north (Sapa, Ha Giang) allow another two or three days compared to the hubs, because the parcel passes first through the sorting centre of the nearby major city and is then delivered by local couriers. After your order on europacco.com, shipment tracking is particularly useful if the recipient lives outside the metropolises.

Tết, customs and other delicate moments

Tết, the Vietnamese New Year, is the most critical time for logistics. It falls between late January and mid-February, follows the lunar calendar and officially halts the country for about a week, with a practical slowdown of ten days: most Vietnamese return to their home villages, and factories and offices empty out. For shipments with fixed deadlines around Tết, allow at least two weeks of lead time. On the customs side, Vietnam is not part of the EU: the system is digitalised and generally fast, but a clear description in English, a realistic declared value and, for commercial shipments, an invoice with HS codes are required. Vague descriptions like "samples" or "gift" often cause a block. Other dates when the country slows down are 30 April (Reunification Day), 1 May and 2 September (National Day).

Shipping Italian coffee to the country of coffee: what really sells?

There is a small irony in shipments from Italy to Vietnam: Vietnam is the world's second-largest coffee producer (Robusta), yet Italian coffee regularly arrives in the bars of Saigon and Hanoi as an imported premium product. The same logic applies to other Italian foods: artisan pasta, extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, aged parmesan and wines are in demand at chains of Italian restaurants, gourmet concept stores and among the new Vietnamese middle class. On the B2B side, leather samples, fabrics, metal fittings and components for the fashion and furniture sectors travel, generally to plants in the Ho Chi Minh City and Hai Phong areas.