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International Shipping is Coming
As a few commenters kindly pointed out on the previous post, we don’t have much support for international customers in the initial release of the General Store.
We went live with North America only while we get some details squared away on international shipping. One of the big problems with the old model was that it didn’t allow us to handle international packages properly. We couldn’t charge properly, and we had trouble with customs requirements, resulting in dozens (maybe hundreds) of packages being returned to us or simply sitting in the postal system forever. The time and money we spent on this would have put us out of business, and directly led to our decision to change out model. So that’s the bad news.
The good news is that we’re figuring this out and we’re going to add more countries as quickly as possible. We’ll probably add countries that support Global Priority Mail first, since there postal rates & regulations are standardized. Other countries will be added as we figure out the shipping rates.
Some commenters also asked about our billing system. After a lot of research and work we decided to stay with Paypal. TrustCommerce promised a lot but could not deliver for us. While their API worked well and we got the technical side set up easily, the financial side and the customer service didn’t meet our needs. Basically we were having trouble finding a merchant account provider who would allow us to 1) ship to all the countries we wanted to ship to, and 2) sell packages without saying exactly what was inside. I think if we had spent more time filling out forms and waiting weeks for approvals we might have been able to work this out, but Paypal ended up being so much easier that it was worth abandoning the work we had done. Our trouble with Paypal involved the inflexibility of their subscription service, which seems great for software subscriptions but less-great for irregularly scheduled schwag delivery. Since we’re not using the subscription engine anymore I think it will work well.
November 22nd, 2006 at 11:46 am
Kudo’s for responding so fast! I hope international shipping will be in place before SW4 is completely sold out, I wanted to grap that package… Global Priority seems to be a good choice (especially since they also deliver to The Netherlands
)
Good luck guys, keep us posted!
November 22nd, 2006 at 12:58 pm
We may end up using UPS or DHL for international. This allows us to ship pretty much anywhere in the world and track delivery of the packages, though it may be a bit more expensive. We’re on it!
We only have a few VS4 packages, but we plan on getting more INTL support before VS5 is ready.
November 22nd, 2006 at 1:26 pm
[…] Valleyschwag, the promo-material subscription service which temporarily paused service after sending out their fourth package of schwag (here’s my very own VS3 ) is back in business, with some selected shirts and remainders of VS4. however, stuff is currently shipping to america only … intl. shipping hopefully soon to come! […]
November 22nd, 2006 at 2:49 pm
Thanks for the quick response…and good news! I actually appreciate and understand that you are sorting out the details before putting the new system in place for international orders. As I have said in the past it was always a huge plus that you paid attention to those of us outside the US! Thanks again and good luck!
November 22nd, 2006 at 6:03 pm
How about some sort of announcement when new packages are released. If a friend hadn’t of mentioned it to me, I would have had no idea that you opened your store.
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:31 am
Yay for sticking with Paypal - will definately keep checking back now. I think that’s been a very wise decision on your part (and it means I can make purchases!).
Next stop, shipping to Scotland
November 24th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
@deano
We certainly plan on notifying our loyal patrons when new schwag packages are available. When we have more international shipping sorted out we’ll send a general announcement, and when VS5 is ready our subscribers will be the first to know.
November 24th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
@Unmajestic
[I tried to comment on your post, http://www.unmajestic.com/permalink.asp?1a7c26c71e241dcb6a407f49d9c06db7 but your comment form is erring on submit.]
Sorry you’re not happy with our implementation. We continue to do the best we can to make a sustainable service that works for everyone.
As for the blog commenting, nobody is ever blocked from commenting unless their post is spam. It’s possible that the Akismet filter we’re using thinks your post is spam for some reason; I’ll take a look at the blocked posts and see if I can find your lost comments.
November 25th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
[…] UPDATE: Valleyschwag is working on adding international shipping. At the time of the launch it was just the US, Canada and Mexico. tags: Laughing Squid (T) , Valleyschwag (T) , Valleyschwag General Store (T) , t-shirts (T) Comments RSS feed | Trackback URL […]
November 26th, 2006 at 12:50 am
It’s great to see the new store appear. Like Deano I hope for a ‘notify me’ option and like many others I’m also waiting for the International shipping option (UK).
One question which I’ve wanted to ask is, do you have separate ‘international packages’? by that I mean packages with less heavy stuff (eg. the wierd gadgets) which would cost less to ship overseas, or do you plan on keeping everyone equal? Of course I’m hoping for the latter, but from looking over the flickr pics of people’s VS4 packages some people did manage to get an aweful lot (not that I’m complaining with my schwag, I was very happy). I don’t know where they’re from, I’m just speculating
)
Keep up the great work, I can’t wait until VS5… any plans to have a pre-order for it so you know roughly how many to produce? I think that’s the big thing you’ll be missing with this new model, since before you could cut-off the new registrations and know exactly how many were needed.