Payments for Overseas Sales

how do you handle them

[smackman]

Today I got two inquiries about shipping overseas (France and New Zealand) and frankly I'd love to do this. I already will ship to APO military addresses and Canada which require the customs forms, but I'm concerned about the safety of payments and avoiding fraudulent sales, chargebacks, etc... We have our own merchant account, so I guess we could take credit cards, but I sense there is bigger risk there. Is anyone shipping from the US to overseas and how do you handle payments? Do you require wire transfers (and charge the customer extra for the wire fee), do you use paypal, something else? I'd love to find a solution that is customer friendly and safe for me. If anyone has ideas I'd sure appreciate hearing about your experiences.
Thx.

[pmac]

It depends. I don't do a ton of overseas stuff and don't have a hard and fast policy in place, I tend to make a decision on a sale by sale basis. If for example I get an order from Japan on a hotmail account and they never inquired about the shipping cost beforehand, I wont even bother.

However if the customer emailed beforehand asking for specifics and shipping quotes from a "@honda.co.jp address, I will usually accept payment via a credit card and ship.

For large or suspicious orders, I request a wire transfer or certified funds.

All in all I tend to go with my gut.

[Ankheg]

I sell only services and small, relatively inexpensive (<$50) goods. I accept the regular forms of payment - paypal, for a lot of people, or CC's through 2checkout now, for international customers, which make probably 10% of all goods shipped. I've never had a problem this far.

I make clear, up-front, what foreign shipping is going to cost, and if I do get a suspicious order I either make sure I'm shipping to a confirmed or billing address, or on a couple of occasions I've quickly called the buyer to 'check them out'.

That said, I've only had purchases from the UK, Ireland, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Israel. I might be a little more suspicious if someone tried to order from, say, Zaire, or the DRC...

Go with your gut is really the best advice I can give.