Delivery
Fast deliveries are impressive no matter which country you have business in. We ordered shirts from Zara Online in Spain to 3bits. We order at 11 AM on Monday, selected the express option (2-3 days) for 99 SEK. At Tuesday at 11:30 AM, the door rang and the order was delivered. We received a mail the next day that they credited the delivery fee as a good-will gesture, probably since it was a pretty large order.
It is hard to find a carrier which is optimal for all markets. It is also unusual wit service points to deliver packages down in Europe, instead it is more common with home deliveries. Once again it is important with different solutions depending on market.
It is also important to avoid incorrect addresses, make sure that they are checked before delivery. Otherwise the orders might get lost, there will be large costs for bounces, and disappointed customers.
Tracking is important to search and find packages. Otherwise it is impossible to act if the customer claims that the order is missing.
Have in mind that transportation labels are often more complex than you think. Start working with this as early as possible.
Delivery Fees
Investigate what a reasonable delivery fee is to a customer and compare this to what you will pay for the delivery.
I was once contacted by a carrier who said that the carrier file had errors. No delivery fee for an order with 3 balls to The Netherlands, the delivery fee was more than the entire order. This was express delivery with an aircraft. The reason was that Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet a few days earlier had an article about the bad thing about charging for deliveries.
It can be right to offer free deliveries, but it must be a calculated decision.
This summer, the EU rules about returns are changed, so that countries no longer can demand that returns should be free for the customer. This is a welcome change, so the rules in EU are the same, but the question is who will remove the free return option in the countries where the customer now are used to that service.
Decide how the customer should return items, report at the site and print a return label, a return label directly in the package, or do everything by themselves?
How should the return be marked so it can be identified at the warehouse?
What you should do if the customer claims that the order is returned, but you haven’t received it?
Customs and IntraStat
The customs demand statements of the shipments. Provide a solution that fits your volume. Everything from documents that are easily accessible to electronic information directly to the customs in the receiving country.
It will be ”customs on customs” if the goods are first imported to Sweden, and then shipped to another country if you make an simple solution. This can be solved by custom free warehouses, but that is fairly complicated and an expensive solution.
There are several areas that belong to EU, but with exceptions of some kind to EU’s normal rules, it is important to decide how these should be handled.
France, Great Britain, Cyprus, Denmark, The Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Germany are areas with exceptions.
When you reach a certain volume to and from other EU countries, IntraStat statements are required. When the requirement starts, you should account for it the month after. You need to have the solution ready in time before the requirement starts.
Next Part
In the last part of this series of articles about internationalization I will mention what you can have in mind when it comes to organization and time consumption, and how you can launch.
