To ship Worldwide or not to ship Worldwide, that is the question....

[momcqueen]

Once again, I find myself wondering if the cons of shipping Worldwide really do outweighs the pros.

Looking at the Buyer Block log as I occasionally do, I see I missed about $250 in sales to two buyers in blocked countries, one in Saudi Arabia and the other in Czech Republic. (And more if you count the one who doesn't pay his/her bills at the bottom of the list.) 

Worth noting is that I only ship parcels with tracking so these would be travelling with Xpresspost or Air Parcel.

Am I being smart by limiting my ship-to countries to those served by Tracked Packet? Or short-sighted? I cannot decide. 

[retroman_studios]

I'll share my experience, although it was my initial expansion to the US, as I was previously a Canada only seller.

I got stung a few times with US buyers, as things go. However, it really depends on the category and what kind of fraud percentages there are. I used to sell electronics, and for that, I was Canada only as my foray into selling state side was a disaster.

However, now that I sell watches, the fraud rate for the type of items I sell (Disney watches etc.) is much lower, in fact a few months ago I had a decent amount of sales and everyone was happy.

Now, given the price bracket of the watches I sell, I wouldn't expand outside of the US, it would not be worth it. 

For you it depends what your problem ratio is, ie; for every 100 customers, how many people have issues (not counting our own mistakes as sellers). Expect those issues to expand depending on the countries you enable shipping for. Also, keep in mind many sellers will not ship to certain countries because even the insurance companies refuse to insure packages due to high corruption rate of postal systems in those regions.

It might be worthwhile to go incognito in a browser, go to the eBay landing page for the country you want to ship to, look and see who your competitors are, how they are rated and what kind of feedback is being left for them. Because you may find certian areas although they would add sales, may add unwanted feedback that could stress you out or cause issues. 

I usually look at a sales situation from both effort and profit. If I can make the same money but have no further stress by keeping everything Canada & US, then that's good. But if I'm only adding small change (think profit not sales $$ amount) for the extra risk and/or effort, then I'm probably not going to.

Sometimes shop owners can simply add a product line to the existing selections and markets and that will make more profits than expanding into new regions.

[femmefan1946]

@retroman_studios

Also, keep in mind many sellers will not ship to certain countries because even the insurance companies refuse to insure packages due to high corruption rate of postal systems in those regions.

Very good point.

I've seen some US sellers who would ship internationally (even before the protections of the GSP) who used shipinsure both to insure high value packages and as a way to decide whether or not to Block certain countries.

Basically if it was not insurable through a very professional insurance company, they wouldn't ship there. Even if it was a $10 item.

Learn from those who know.

[15westcoast]

I will ship out of Canada if the seller will pay for tracking ,as I will not ship

without it.  In most cases (Australia ) the cost of the tracking option is

more than the buyer wishes to pay.   I have been stung on "Did not

receive my item" as I had shipped without tracking, so now I insist on it.

[hlmacdon]

Until we get the granularity where it is easy to setup ship to permissions based on shipping services (ie restrict ABC country to Xpress post) I think you have the right model in place now given the collectible nature and higher average sell prices. That is usually what I setup for other websites but we don't get that sort of flexibility here. For any qualified buyer (ie an experienced international buyer that knows what they are doing), it isn't hard to find a forwarding service that can take care of a blocked location issue. I find those buyers tend to be far less problematic then the inexperienced international buyer that wonders why there package hasn't shown up in a week.

As femmefan1946 notes all of the third party insurers have done actuarial analysis of claim probabilities for all of the locations, usually based on aggregate data from all of their larger retail customers and services providers like Endicia/Stamps/etc. Their lists tend to mirror the Post Expres locations quite closely, which means they classify the tracked packet countries as lower risk. That doesn't mean other locations are a total disaster, but there is enough of a loss rate that you would want to have tracking in place unless your margins are on the higher side.

With a higher likelihood of loss/delay it just isn't worth bothering with on ebay these days unless you have a very honest/responsible demographic. They are intervening far too much for the benefit of buyer acquisition these days, down to making decisions about what they feel is "too long" for even tracked shipments, which is just getting asinine when you combined the push for free international returns as well.

The other consideration here is that I know a few retailers that ship worldwide and they are not cut off from the major third party insurers for too many claims. They have chosen to compensate by raising product and shipping prices to make up for their loss rate, but that just feels counterproductive given they are only picking up incremental sales. The UPU still finds itself in a pretty ridiculous state of getting postal services working on the same page with the same services and systems and we are starting to see a lot of gamesmanship involving intentional delays of mail delivery as a form of silent protest over terminal dues. Things in general are not operating as smoothly as in years past.

[rose-dee]

One way to analyze this issue of course is to determine what percentage that $250 in lost sales represents of your total sales over the same period.  However, there are two problems with this approach.  Using the blocked bidder list doesn't necessarily tell you how many international buyers looked at your listings, saw you didn't ship to their country, and just didn't bother attempting to buy when they might otherwise have done so.  That could be a much larger number. 

Secondly, the few blocked bidders on your list may not actually represent the countries where you could expect to get the most international sales.   It's pretty difficult to guess in advance where those might come from. 

I think the best a seller can do is determine, as hlmacdon  and others have said, which are the countries least likely to be problematic in terms of shipping and insurance, and/or outright corruption, and narrow your international ship-to list accordingly.  Your tracked shipping will protect you in most instances anyway, reducing the risk even further.  Given eBay's current buyer protection policies, I can't see the point in shipping absolutely worldwide anymore.  

[ricarmic]

For me the answer is simple, 35% of my sales are international, 70% if one counts the USA.

I've also noticed my international sales seem to be increasing, I suspect this is because fewer vendors are shipping internationally, this makes my stuff more attractive to international buyers!!

Note though that I live in the wonderful world of stamps, and we seem to have less problems shipping WW than others will....