So i ship clothing to the US and Canada via FedEx. Customers from the UK have been sending tons of emails so I want to ship there. I hear USPS international flat rate envelopes are the way to go. Any suggestion about rates / duties / customs documents is much appreciated. I really have no idea what I need outside North America

just be careful.. I made one sale to Canada and after a couple of weeks I got a letter from fed ex saying I owed them $75 for duties and customs because the recipient wouldnt pay for it! (so they charged my customer and because they didnt pay it auto gets pushed on the sender... so weird)

I am unsure of how to ship anywhere outside the U.S. without incurring extra fees, and if I dont know the fees how can I apply them to my customers!?

Not sure how you'd feel about this .. but I'm in the UK and one of the people I buy from about 6 times a year is in the US and they always label the box as a gift and/or lower value on the import label ... so I don't have to pay extra ... I've never asked about this and I only realised after about the 4th package ... (who wants to look at label when you got a new toy to play with )

Starlord

Originally Posted by AirAndAqua.com

just be careful.. I made one sale to Canada and after a couple of weeks I got a letter from fed ex saying I owed them $75 for duties and customs because the recipient wouldnt pay for it! (so they charged my customer and because they didnt pay it auto gets pushed on the sender... so weird)

I am unsure of how to ship anywhere outside the U.S. without incurring extra fees, and if I dont know the fees how can I apply them to my customers!?

That's FedEx on the Canadian side, more than likely. They have a unique way of screwing over merchants. One of my clients has to move to the States this year because of it.

The same client does ship to Britain quite a bit, and we've learned a few things about it along the way:

1) When shipping to Ireland, allow a month extra lead time. Stuff sits in the port of Dublin for about that length of time, usually in a shipping carton on a dock somewhere.

2) USPS is fine. It moves fairly quickly (I think 2-3 weeks) and the British Royal Mail is surprisingly efficient that way. Not sure how to package it, though.

3) Declare the wholesale replacement cost if you can on the item as opposed to the retail cost...you'll save on insurance that way, and if it gets lost and needs to be reshipped, you're only paying the wholesale price anyway.

Only declaring the wholesale price is very smart. I never thought of that before

Also consider APO/FPO customers. Those are Soldiers who are deployed overseas. From a senders perspective, it shouldn't cost any more to ship to APO/FPO, but you have to go through alot of the customs procedures. A Soldier in Europe or Iraq would have would put APO AE for their city and state, and the zipcode would likely start with 09xxx. Remember that there are hundreds of thousands of american soldiers overseas at any given time, and we all love to buy stuff online, since we don't have access to the American stores that we're used to.
APO = Army Post Office
AE = Army Europe