Out of area shipping charges

how do you handle extra charges couriers to try to sting you for.

[kris_winter]

How does your businesses handle out of area shipping charges applied by couriers. Every time a courier invoice arrives its littered with additional charges that we couldnt determine at the time of ordering at didnt charge the customer.

The only way i can see of getting around this is to start compiling a city database and start determining couriers charges on a per city bases instead of per country.

How do other business handle this.

[ecommerceprofit]

I'm with you - not sure how else to handle this other than to look up every transaction first. I don't think our shipping company provides us with these costs built in to our computerized shipping tables for customers - so we end up paying for our customers extra shipping fees: residential fees, DAS fees, fuel surcharge and then the bigie: dimensional weights.

We are very careful about dimensional weight and we charge a handling fee now to cover the above surprise fees and it seems to even out so we don't lose money.

[kris_winter]

yeah deminsional, thats one to watch out for, we sell one sized product, so every package is pretty much identical. Still it doesnt stop them trying to slip in a dimensional charges now and again.

Were currently doing the same as you ecommerceprofit, were having to charge about 12% extra to all users to cover the extra charges incurred by a few people living in the sticks, which isnt very fair.

[kris_winter]

PS, quick bit of advice for anyone new to mail order, check every courier invoice very carefully. My company has been through 5 different couriers in the last 5 years and all of them except amtrak have tried to con us time n time again. Amtrak incidentally actually phone up now and again and say they have charged you too much and give you a credit before youve even noticed they have done it.

[ecommerceprofit]

Amtrak - there's a new one I had not heard of :-) Cool stuff...

[amtrak.com...]

[kris_winter]

i dont think thats the same company, i was talking about Amtrak UK.

[amtrak.co.uk...]

They cost a bit more but you get what you pay for, never had any problems with service or billing.