Shipping products overseas has many implications. The good part is that you get to move your products internationally. However, you need to consider plenty of things as shipping rules and laws apply differently. If it’s your first time to ship goods internationally, you should note that it’s a lot different from shipping products locally. While hiring an international freight forwarder can be helpful, you need to be extra careful and consider the destination country’s law on receiving products. Moreover, listed below are the things you should keep in mind when you’re shipping goods overseas:
Product Packaging
Before you ship out your goods, you need to ensure that your product will arrive in its best shape in the destination country. When shipping internationally, expect that the courier will be moving your product from one place to another. While you may want to ensure that they provide proper handling, you can just never be sure about certain instances when your package can be damaged. To ensure that your product arrives in its best condition, you should provide proper product packaging by securing the items with bubble wraps, packaging peanuts, mushroom packaging, or green wrap. In this way, you don’t have to worry about the exterior of your box. As long as you properly secure the product itself with your choice of protection, that should suffice.
Moreover, you should provide extra precaution for your products that are fragile or has liquid contents. You need to ensure that it’ll not break or leak in transit so that you don’t have to worry about refunds or shipping again to your customers. When you ship out products that arrive in poor condition to your customers, it’ll leave a bad impression that you don’t care about how your customers receive them but just focus on the profit that you made. As you sell products, you need to ensure customer satisfaction to acquire more customers and orders, increasing your sales and creating proper branding in the process.
Identify International Shipping Restrictions
Every country has different regulations about which product they can receive internationally. Before you proceed with selling a product globally, you must identify each country’s rules and restrictions. If you’re selling products such as alcohol, dog collars, CBD, fruit juice, and more, you should check the restrictions to see if they allow such items in their country. This will help you to avoid any issues which could impose legal actions on your business. Along with this, you can set your customer’s expectations about which products they can and cannot receive from your store. Suppose you decide to push through with shipping the restricted items out to your customers. In that case, you may risk getting your company banned from shipping out products indefinitely, which can decrease your sales dramatically.
Inform Customers About Custom Fees
Depending on the country where you’ll deliver your items, your customer may have to pay an additional customs fee for handling. If your customer paid for a certain amount, they might need to pay additional customs fees for the taxes, depending on their country’s regulation. While you cannot avoid taxes and customs fees, you need to inform your customers about the additional expense they might need to pay. If there’s a custom fee rate available for everyone to see, you should place them on your company’s FAQs so that your customer can have an idea and prepare for additional cash they need to bring before receiving their product.
Fill Out Required Paperwork
Unless you’re shipping out goods to your family, you won’t be needing to submit extensive and commercial paperwork to your country’s customs. However, if you’re a business that sells products online, you should present specific paperwork which enables you to ship your items internationally. Moreover, you might need to present a commercial invoice that clearly states the products inside the package, their value, origin, and destination country. In this way, the customs can view the box’s essential details and refrain from contacting the company to confirm specific information that you can easily display.
Consider Shipping Time Frame
Unlike local shipments, expect that it’ll take a lot longer for your international shipments to arrive at their destination. With international shipping, anticipate that it may come within two to four weeks, depending on the courier you use and the country’s customs regulations. As you’re going to ship out products internationally, you should ponder if your perishable goods could survive the time frame, or you might want to consider eliminating them from among your internationally available products to avoid refunds and unsatisfied customers. Ideally, you should inform your customers about the time frame for shipping international products so that they know when to expect your product. In this way, you can prevent annoyed customers who will constantly contact you about order updates.
Identify Shipping Fees
When shipping products internationally, you should know that it can cost a lot as you’re going to use air or sea freight. While those may seem to be standard, their fees are more expensive compared with local shipments. If you’re promoting free international shipping to your customers, you should ponder if you’ll still make a profit or you’ll lose due to international shipping fees. If you cannot accommodate the cost of international shipping, you might want to consider allowing your customers to pay for their shipping fees. After all, free shipping is primarily popular with local deliveries only. When shipping items internationally, you should also know that the fee can depend on the size of your product.
The bigger the product, the more expensive the shipping rate would be. Along with that, you also need to consider the product’s weight as it can affect the courier’s ability to ship your product. Ideally, you should have a complete list of the shipping rates per size, weight, and country to adequately indicate them on your website and allow customers to prepare for the shipping fee they need to prepare. If you’re shipping multiple products internationally, look for a shipping company that allows for bulk shipment, which helps you to charge your customers less and helps them to save a few bucks.
Conclusion
Running an international business can be challenging, especially because you’ll need to be cautious about plenty of things. You need to ensure that you have complete paperwork and commercial invoice to prevent any inconvenience that could risk your items being shipped back to you. You also need to be aware of the custom and shipping fees and how you and your customers can handle them. Moreover, you shouldn’t forget about the importance of proper packaging to ensure that your goods arrive in their best shape.