So, the shipping method will be duty pre-paid, which means you guys _shouldn't_ be charged, and we're responsible for paying that money on your behalf. So when we calculate the shipping in the store, we'll add a flat percentage on top to cover that (apparently we're also charged for a percentage of the shipping fee as well?). This will not be exactly VAT, and there will be lots of exceptions and rules we don't know about (but please tell us when you run into one so we can try to do what we can).... Basically, you'll be paying us a higher shipping fee for the option to not have to worry about having your package held hostage and pay other companies surprise fees, but we're not going to be charging you the exactly proper amount every time to zero out what we collect and what we spend. For now....
This is not because we want to gouge you guys on shipping. This is because I fought to get you guys an option before we have all the data we would need to do it exactly right. I feel like a half-step here is better than giving you only one option that is almost guaranteed to be frustrating. So when you checkout, you'll be able to see our inexact calculation ahead of time and make your own judgment call (and we'll be working behind the scenes to make the calculations ever more efficient/correct/cheaper over time). Consider this like a beta or early-access game.
Not perfect yet, but hopefully still worth having access to in its unfinished state.
Apparently, we only added rules for the UK since that was the bulk of the complaints we received. Our shipping calculation rules are up to 2500 lines in a hellish excel spreadsheet, so our operations guy was reluctant to add in a new method for every country, but I bullied him into giving it a shot so there should be MSI (cheaper and probably with hidden fees -- aka our current method/rate) as well as MSI (duty paid with a percentage tacked on up front) "soon".
USPS priority international will cost $40 to ship a t-shirt. They don't do dimensional weight adjustments, though, so it becomes viable when you order a bunch of things, and I know they're the carrier you guys all seemed to prefer. So I'm advocating for that as a third option as well. We know the rates, so it's just math up front to make them systematic, and then some un-fun maintenance as the rates constantly change. I'm of the opinion that we just provide the options available to us and then see what shakes out, but there are valid counter-points that confusing options at checkout will cause people to just bail and you guys don't buy quite enough to keep us solvent, so we still have to worry about the regular folks....
We've also been talking to
companies that specialize in this calculation, but we're not ready to pull that trigger yet. And we're still working on different international warehousing options.
This happened two years ago or so with Canada as well. The shipping companies/customs folks just changed the way things worked and suddenly all the customers got screwed while we scrambled to figure out what our options actually are. I'm sorry that happened to you and I'd be super frustrated in your position as well.
Our problem is we don't always know what happens after the package leaves our warehouse. MSI takes up to 6 weeks to even get us a final list of fees we owe on a shipment, and that probably doesn't include any feedback about what you guys have to pay additionally since that's handled by a bunch of separate local couriers. There are a lot of different countries and most of them have their own lists of special rules for scores of different classifications of products. And then those rules change, so you have to keep up with them, as well as the rate changes from the couriers and different fee structures around them that can change every couple of weeks. On top of which, our warehouse will add (and change) their own fees and rules related to specific couriers/countries....
And that's just the intentional changes. We also run into weird glitches and bugs from time to time, like when our replacements were getting dinged by more fees. It turned out that when we passed a value of zero to the warehouse, they would instead look up the price on file instead, so that was surprising and hard to narrow down. Eventually we just did a manual check before we hand off the order that says if the value is zero, make it one dollar instead because that was easier and faster than working with them on accepting the zero dollar value.
If there was a way to pass on actual rates to you, we would. In the absence of that, we're trying very hard to keep up and keep improving, and I am really and truly sorry it's still disappointing and frustrating a lot of the time.
I've been advocating for this since chemgear brought it up to me.
The friction I've run into so far is based on accurate record keeping and royalty reporting. For one thing, combining a bunch of orders into one shipment means those original orders never actually get marked as "shipped" without a fair amount of manual overhead. And this new meta-order has all the actual shipping information, then, but there's no record of it as a single order, so it wouldn't generate an email or pass on tracking info. To say nothing of all the internal accounting that gets triggered on order fulfillment. And that's only considering multiple shipments from a single store. Combining our stores compounds all of those issues exponentially.
So, on top of that, how do we then report it back to the clients? Do we just add up the number of individual orders and use that as the denominator to calculate a percentage of shipping and chop up the final number to pass on to each company? Or by item count, or by subtotals of weight? And what about storage fees charged by the warehouse to sit on the orders? Is that tracked separately and then calculated based on days between orders and line-itemed out that way, per client, or just split down the middle again (by item? by order?)? Do we need to limit the time we can hold things because at some point the storage fees negate the combined-shipping discount? Where is that crossover point for each combination of weights/dimensions?
Then we have to figure out how to message all of this in a way that makes sense to you guys who would be willing to use it without me having to write a novella every time someone asks a question about it....
Anyway, messy is a good word for it since I'm sure there are lots of angles I'm not able to predict up front.... I'll keep working on ways that make it feasible, because I agree it's a good idea and would be super helpful. After the initial push-back, I've scaled back some and am working on us doing a pilot program for just artwork (since it's in-house and shipping an extra print or two is only the most incremental of extra costs). No progress to report yet.