THIS IS AN ARCHIVE POST FROM 2015
“What do you use for international shipping?” This is one of the questions I get most often from entrepreneurs who are just starting to sell internationally. If you decide to sell B2C, directly to customers, sooner or later you have to deal with the challenges of shipping abroad.
With Virivee I have been shipping orders to customers in other countries for almost three years, so I have gained quite a bit of experience with international shipping. I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned, in case it can be useful to someone else running a small business.
Basically, there are three shipping methods that make sense for regular international sales: postal services, courier companies and fulfillment centers.
In this post, I’m going to write about the first one: shipping by post.
Shipping by post
A lot of people have reservations about postal services, and not entirely without reason. But when you’re shipping internationally, it doesn’t really matter whether you personally like or dislike your local postal service. For certain types of international shipping, it is simply unavoidable, so you might as well make peace with it.
One important thing to understand is that when you send a package abroad, the postal service in the destination country often matters much more than the one you use to send it.
Postal items, whether letters or parcels, can generally be sent as ordinary or registered mail.
Registered mail
The main difference between ordinary and registered mail is that registered items receive a tracking number. This allows you to follow the shipment and, in many cases, check online whether it has been delivered.
International postal tracking can be checked through various online tracking systems. Unfortunately, online tracking doesn’t work equally well in every country. Australia is one of the frustrating examples for me, because we can’t always follow the journey of a package online.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the local postal service has no record of the package. Someone in the destination country, such as the recipient, can often contact the postal service and find out where the item is.
International postal tracking numbers also follow a standard format. A typical example looks something like RR123456789XX, where the final letters indicate the country from which the item is sent.
If a registered item doesn’t arrive and there is no useful information in the online tracking system, it can usually be investigated after a certain period has passed.
In my experience, relatively few registered items ever reach this point. And even among those, some have actually been delivered or accepted by someone else, such as a neighbour, who simply hasn’t passed the package on yet.
There have also been a few cases where a customer claims not to have received something even though it has apparently been delivered. Fortunately, this is very rare.
Registered mail is generally a pretty good solution. The biggest problem is that it can be relatively expensive, especially for very light items. The additional cost can be quite significant compared with the basic postage.
There is another thing to consider when selling online: sometimes you don’t actually have a choice.
Some online marketplaces require sellers to provide tracking information for certain orders, destinations or shipping methods. In those cases, sending an inexpensive untracked letter or parcel simply isn’t an option if you want to comply with the marketplace’s requirements.
When is registered mail worth it?
As registered shipping can become quite expensive, especially for lightweight items, I would mainly use it when:
- the item is valuable
- the item is unique and cannot easily be replaced or reproduced
- the customer is willing to pay the additional shipping cost
- the marketplace requires tracking
- the destination has recently been affected by a natural disaster
- you are shipping to a destination where postal delivery is considered less reliable
What do I mean by a “less reliable” postal destination?
I’m thinking of places where there is a higher perceived risk that a package containing something valuable might disappear during delivery. Of course, this is difficult to assess objectively, because nobody wants to test it by actually losing packages.
At the moment, Russia and India are the destinations I am particularly cautious about.
Where I wouldn’t necessarily use registered mail
It is probably easier to list the destinations where I generally feel comfortable sending ordinary mail. These include much of Northern and Western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Singapore.
Of course, packages can disappear anywhere, so if you’re sending something valuable or unique, registered shipping is still worth considering.
There is another situation when I would definitely choose registered shipping, even to a normally reliable destination: after a major natural disaster.
If the region you’re sending to, or the area through which international mail first enters the country, has recently been affected by a major storm, snowstorm, flood or similar event, postal services can be seriously disrupted.
This happens from time to time in the US. Heavy snowstorms, for example, can bring postal services to a standstill in some parts of the country for several days.
I usually check the relevant postal service’s website and local weather reports before sending important packages.
In January this year, eight Virivee packages disappeared in the US during one such situation. Normally, we get about this many letters lost there over an entire year.
That is a pretty good reminder that even a normally reliable postal system can be affected by circumstances completely outside your control.
Why do I like using the post for international shipping?
There are several reasons why postal services work well for us, especially as a small business shipping relatively light handmade products:
- If you don’t need tracking, it can be quite cheap for lightweight packages.
- If the recipient doesn’t accept the package or the address is incorrect, postal services generally return it without the kind of additional return charges that courier companies can charge.
- Letters and small postal items are often less likely to go through a formal customs process than larger parcels, depending on the destination and the contents.
Why don’t I like using the post for international shipping?
There are disadvantages too:
- It can be slow.
- Heavier packages can become expensive.
- Registered or tracked shipping can be expensive, especially compared with the cost of sending very light items.
- Some marketplaces require tracking, so you may not always be able to choose the cheapest shipping method.
- For some destinations, postal shipping may be the only realistic option, which can be frustrating when you would rather have a choice.
For a small business selling handmade products internationally, shipping is one of those things that you gradually learn by doing. What looks like a simple “just send the package” problem can actually involve postage rates, tracking, customs, returns, weather and the reliability of different postal systems.
And the best shipping method isn’t necessarily the same for every order. It depends on the value and size of the product, the destination, the customer’s expectations and sometimes even the marketplace you’re selling through.