I was wondering how much business we may be losing by not selling internationally. The shipping nightmare is what is keeping me from doing this. Thanks!

Dawn

About 25 percent here.

Probably close to 20% and growing. Two years ago it was hardly 1 or 2 orders per week.

To answer your question directly - enough to make us continue to ship internationally, it's worth the extra paperwork. Just make sure you charge enough in shipping to cover your time and effort. For us that's just a few dollars more per order.

Very small percentage, but Im glad Im offering it. Haven't (knock on wood) had any issues with shipping at all.

We ship about 25% international. As mentioned its enough to keep us doing it even with the additional paperwork.

I think my percentage is much lower than 25% (never really analyzed it), but it is still significant enough to offer it. International order amounts tend to be higher than domestic too.

I've got about 50% international orders here. And yes, the shipping is definitely a pain...especially since the USPS real-time rates for letter-post are still not functioning...

But it all depends upon what the market is for your products internationally. I would suggest giving it a try for a little while though...it could really pay off!

it was around 50% but I think its dropped off a bit, but its still worth offering.

Often the international orders are larger in value which can't be a bad thing.

As for shipping we rarely have problems, we use Endicia to print all of our USPS postage, that means it pre prints all the international customs stuff so its very quick.

GREAT question!
We've been thinking about doing the same thing. We'll have to bring more inventory in first though, because our manufacturers will not drop ship out of the US.
Maybe we'll start shipping to Canada first, as an experiment.

We ship mostly UPS.
I don't really understand the whole shipping International thing goes (yet).

My question is:
What is the biggest pain, as far as shipping Internationally goes?

Thanks for the feedback,
Ben N

Just watch out for orders from certain countries. Like India, Pakistan, Nigeria. Be leery of large orders. Also be leery of orders that bypass your on line site and are e-mailed to you. Never take an order where they give you a credit card by email or claim they can't be reached by phone or fax. i have good luck with orders from japan, england, germany, italy and a few others

you certainly have to be more careful with international orders, big no no's are Indonesia, India, South Africa, Croatia, you get the idea.

Be wary of people who ask you to wave customs fee's or adjust the declared value of the items.

I would also suggest using an IP address locator, for us its an essential tool. For example we received a large order yesterday, was billed and shipped to the US, but the actual IP address was from Ghana!

For us it's getting someone at the USPS that knows what they are doing. We get told as many different things as they have people. Sometimes our mailman will bring a package back because it is rejected for some reason. When we bring it back to the post office no one can tell us what was wrong or missing.

The other pain is filling out the customs forms. We have recently switched to Endicia and it has sped the whole process up.

yep, forget doing International USPS packages by hand, you'll be there all day, and like PRS mentioned most USPS employees don't know what to do with them - Endicia is the only way to go!

We use the USPS on-line service to process the package label. Seems to work out ok. It does the custom forms and everything. If you ship using a courier I think DHL has the easiest online tools. Remember to Insure all packages shipping international. It is a few extra dollars but well worth it. We check all IP's if there is any suspicion at all about it being legit.

If you want to sell product to China, maybe this is a good choice, post your product to the websites, like alibaba, and good trading forum like FOBShanghai.



FOB Business Forum- The Best Foreign Trade Forum in China
http://forum.FOBShanghai.com

I do many international shipments, maybe about 35%. Its pretty scary though sometimes, I have had someone report a stolen credit card so I ended up refunding the user. Good thing the product was not shipped out.

One thing I don't like about doing international orders is the shipping part, I get pretty worried sometimes how USPS counerparts for other countries handles things like Indonesia or Uruguay. No tracking number isn't helpful either. I do offer shipping methods such as FedEX but the price is really expensive so most people just go with USPS Priority mail.

I'm still tossed about expanding, by shipping to our friends up in Canada.
I've heard too many pain in the butt stories about the duties, taxes, customs, etc., that I'm not sure if it is all worth it right now.

Location based service is a way to go with.

You should not have to worry about Taxes and customs and Duties. That is the customers responsibility. We have it posted as such on our website in an international policy page. We have had no problems with this. When shipping to Canada using UPS Ground they are charged huge courier fees so we ship only USPS Express or UPS AIR.

Occasionally we get asked what the additional fees are and we tell them they have to check with their country. Also occasionally we get asked to change the price that we declare on the customs form and again we decline stating that would be fraud.

We lose a few but recently we did a study on our international orders and saw that the figure was WAY to significiant to warrant shipping international. We have a lot of repeat international customers. It is well worth the extra headache. Once you get through a few of them it is not too difficult. If you ship to places like Iraq or Iran it gets a little sticky but we have gotten our shipments there. Europe and Canada are easy.