Your ecommerce website is live. You’ve got a marketing plan to draw people in to your site and the quality content and usability experience to keep them happy and coming back to you. You’re ready for customers and eager to see your business thrive. The last thing you want to do is turn down an order, right?
Actually, when your ecommerce site is new, a cautious approach to filling orders and shipping is a good idea. For new ecommerce sites considering whether or not to ship internationally, there are a few things to keep in mind which could cause you to avoid shipping internationally or at least delay it until you have more experience and your site is more established.
The two major issues involved in the decision of whether to sell your products internationally are order/credit card fraud, and shipping costs. If your business is based in the United States and you decide to sell internationally, it is likely only a matter of time before you are faced with a fraudulent order. That’s not to say that fraudulent orders don’t originate in the United States, because of course they do, but there are a few reasons why overseas orders are particularly problematic.
Price
One of our new sites, LearningServicesUS.com, sells educational software for teachers. As the site owners were preparing to get their site ready to go live, they were investigating international shipping options and discovered that the shipping to Brazil for one item would be over a thousand dollars! Probably not realistic to consider shipping at that rate. After discussing the options with LearningServicesUS, the verdict was that after they build up clients and sales that they would revisit the international shipping issues and reconsider later. In general, we wouldn’t advise new ecommerce sites to offer international sales, partly for this reason of exorbitant costs, and also because order fraud is much more rampant overseas.
Lack of enforcement
Many developing and Third-World countries don’t and can’t allocate the resources necessary to properly monitor fraud, track fraudulent activity online, and pursue and prosecute thieves. There’s just no money for these tasks. Additionally, the market for stolen credit-card numbers is most active outside of the United States. If you do offer overseas shipping, you may want to consider avoiding orders from certain high-risk countries where fraud is known to be a major problem. Countries such as Romania, Latvia, Belarus and other Eastern European countries have high fraud risks, as does Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana, countries in southern Asia (Phillipines, Thailand, Malaysia) and Middle Eastern countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya). *
What you can do to avoid fraud
It’s wise to have some internal checks in place on your ordering system. These suggestions for protecting yourself from fraudulent orders hold true even for domestic orders, but are especially important if you do decided to offer international shipping.
Avoid shipping to post office boxes. United States Postal Service (USPS) shipping rates are more affordable for overseas shipping when compared to UPS or FedEx, for instance, but USPS can’t track overseas packages and postal service in the destination country may be unreliable.
Compare the credit card billing address to the shipping address. For an overseas order, insist that they match.
Hand review each order over a certain amount. Pick an amount that makes sense for your business and manually review all orders over that amount. If you normally get orders averaging only$100, a $250 order may ring some alarm bells. Consider calling all customers who place orders above this set amount to personally verify their orders. Depending on your product and sales volume, maybe a $500 order would seem suspicious. Just keep in the back of your mind that a “too good to be true” expensive order really may be too good to be true.
Do a BIN look-up. The Bank Identification Number, or BIN, is the first six digits of a credit card. These numbers identify the bank that issued the credit card. The free service at http://all-nettools.com/toolbox, financial allows you to enter the BIN numbers to determine the issuing bank. It’s worth investigating if the issuing bank is located in a country other than where the order is originating.
*source: Scribd
Posted on February 22nd, 2008 by Vanessa
Filed under: Security
We have struggled over this issue also and have adopted the following policy in regard to International sales.
With the exception of military addresses we do not ship internationally, we will ship to freight forwarding companies within the USA that receive your order from us and then ship to you. It is the customer’s responsibility to make arrangements with a freight forwarding company. Most freight forwarding companies can also advise you of any import fees that may be charged by your country. Provide us with the address of the freight forwarding company of your choice within the Continental United States. Furthermore, we only accept credit cards issued from US banks. If you are not in the US and do not have a US issued credit card, DenLors Tools only accepts wire transfers for the full amount of the order including a $15.00 wire transfer fee for payment. After you have provided a US “ship to” address we will email wire transfer instructions to you.
Thanks for sharing your policy, Dennis. I’m sure that kind of approach would work for many businesses. Anybody else have a shipping solution?