I had my first international sale today! Until now, I had limited sales to U.S. addresses only. I was not ready to tackle the shipping process. It turned out not to be all that bad. You can accomplish most of it on-line.
The U.S. Post Office has a decent website that is mostly self explanatory. If you want to pay on-line and print your own shipping label, you need to sign up for an account. Once you have an account and are signed in, you walk step by step through the process.
- Select a destination
- Declare an item value
- Pick a mailing date
- Select a package type – USPS provided or self provided
- Enter the package weight
- Enter a shipping option – anything priority is pretty pricey!
- Complete a customs form and print it
- You do need to read the long list of things you cannot ship. It is a composite list of things that the U.S. government does not allow to be shipped out of country, and things the recipient’s country does not allow in.
- Pay for the shipping and print your label
- Attach the label
- Take the package, the customs form, and the bar code sheet that prints out the post office
- They scan the bar code, review the customs form and attach it to the package, and you are done!
I found it interesting that by doing this on line, you save a couple of bucks. My package was 2 pounds even. The “list price” for shipping to Great Britain was $25.75. The on-line cost was $23.18. And, I was able to pay with PayPal. The customer had paid for the puzzle and shipping via PayPal and I was able to transfer some of that money directly from the PayPal account to the post office.
Pretty easy process overall.