Competitiveness We’ll help you to calculate accurate costs to keep your products competitive on international markets.

One of the key challenges in servicing international markets is optimizing your packaging strategy to arrive at a competitive shipping cost for each order. This impacts on your overall competitiveness, which is arguably the key factor that customers take into account when considering repeat business.

One of the major benefits of using eShopWorld to facilitate your international sales operation is that you only charge the customer once, at the online checkout. In determining the full price – or the fully landed cost - there are a number of important considerations relating to the shipping cost:

By calculating accurate costs based on the most efficient way to ship goods, we ensure that your products remain competitive.

Unlike domestic orders, the cost of shipping internationally does not allow for generic rounding-off of weights and sizes. It must be accurate.

• The shipping cost of international orders represents a much larger percentage of the overall cost of the order.
• The shipping cost is also a key component of customs charges in many parts of the world so must be kept low.

eShopWorld delivers accurate and efficient shipping costs

In essence the real challenge in calculating the fully landed cost of an order lies in calculating the shipping cost. This is fairly straightforward if operating a ‘one box’ strategy, whereby an order is shipped in one box from one location. However, you will also need to consider the possible variations where a single order is split over multiple shipments:

• Availability: an ordered item may not be available, meaning a back order must be raised. This will involve sending additional shipments or holding the order until all items are available;
• Drop-shipping: an order’s item may be sourced from different stock locations to be sent directly to the customer; and
• Over packing: if you use a series of outer cartons to ship, you must determine at the point of purchase which carton size will be used.

All of the above affect the shipping costs and therefore the customs charges.

eShopWorld has addressed these issues and many more. By calculating accurate costs based on the most efficient way to ship goods, we ensure that your products remain competitive on international markets and that your customers are accurately charged, just once.