Want to increase your sales 30 percent in a hurry? Try global sales. How do you sell internationally? You simply accept bids from buyers abroad on eBay US. Surprisingly a lot of sellers don’t do this.

• Selling to consumers abroad on eBay US and on eBays abroad

• Buying on eBays abroad to find products to import and sell on eBay US

• Importing products in bulk to sell on eBay US

• Exporting in bulk for further distribution via sales on eBay US to consumers abroad and via sales on eBays abroad

In this article, I will cover simply selling to buyers from abroad who bid on the items you are selling on eBay US.

Extracurricular Problems

There are two major problems you have over and above the normal procedures you use for selling to buyers within the US. The first is payment. How do you make sure you get paid? The second is customs. How to make sure your item will get through customs in the country in which the buyer lives.

A third potential problem is shipment. However, shipment is not really a problem. It’s easy to ship internationally. Shipment is only a problem from the point of view that it costs more to ship internationally than it does to ship within the US. So, I won’t dwell on shipping as a problem. Nonetheless, you will have to figure the higher costs of shipping into your business calculations when you develop a marketing plan for items that includes selling them to people abroad.

Receiving Payment

Receiving payment from abroad isn’t really so much different than receiving payment from buyers in the US. The real difference is in customer service. For instance, if you wait for a customer ’s check to clear in the US, it happens in a reasonably short period of time. Once it clears, you can ship the product for which you have been paid.

Checks from abroad, however, do not clear so quickly. Consequently, you may have to wait several weeks for the check to clear before you can ship the item with the confidence that you’ve been paid for it. This is not great customer service, but you have to follow this procedure to make sure that you get paid.

Of course, checks are not the only means of payment either for US buyers or for buyers abroad. A popular means of international payment is the postal money order—known as the international money order. If you become familiar with international money orders, you can accept them as a means of payment. Western Union money orders are also a workable means of payment. Unfortunately, Western Union money orders are expensive. It may not be productive to insist that your buyers abroad use them. Regardless of what they cost, however, there are lots of people who seem to use Western Union money orders. PayPal is probably the best alternative of the payment methods for receiving payment from abroad. PayPal now operates in 37 countries and is expanding. PayPal can be considered a safe means of payment, and if you’re selling to buyers in one of the countries where PayPal is established, you should have little trouble getting your customers to pay via PayPal. Unfortunately, there are another 140 countries where potential buyers may buy your products and where PayPal is not yet available.

Credit cards, which are a relatively safe means of payment in the US, are a risky means of receiving payment from buyers in many countries abroad. Receiving payment via credit cards from the industrial nations of Europe and elsewhere where banking rules, regulations, and traditions are well established should not be a problem. For other countries, be extra cautious. For more information on treating credit card payment cautiously, read eBay Business the Smart Way Second Edition.

Always maintain a higher standard for payment acceptance procedures for items you are selling which go for a high price (i.e., big ticket items). You can probably weather being burned on several small items as you build your experience in global selling. But you don’t want to be burned on a big ticket item. For big ticket items you might even want to make your sale contingent on verifications. And then give yourself several days to get the verifications you need for a confident receipt of payment.

Whatever standards and guidelines you set up in regard to receiving payment from buyers abroad, you need to state those in your eBay auction ad. Otherwise buyers from abroad will assume that whatever your normal policies are for receipt of payment are also the policies that will apply to them. So, if you do have separate policies that apply to buyers from abroad—and you should—state them in your eBay auction ad. But don’t freeze out buyers from abroad. You will be cutting your potential sales by a significant percentage.

Customs Procedures

Your primary job in exporting items that you sell to buyers abroad is simply providing the proper documentation for them to import the items. Unfortunately with 180 or so different countries with different requirements for paperwork, this is not necessarily a straightforward job. Fortunately, there is a way to deal with this. It’s not foolproof. Nonetheless, it’s practical. You simply enclose some generic documents with the item, when you ship it, in the hope that it will clear customs in the buyer’s country. For most countries it will work, but for other countries additional documentation may be required. If additional documentation is required, customs will likely notify the buyer who will then notify you. At that point, you can supply the additional documentation. However, as you can imagine, that will cause a delay in the delivery of the item. Such a delay is not good customer service.

To be more precise, you can read eBay Global the Smart Way for access to the information you need to export items correctly to every country. As a practical matter, however, you can get by just by enclosing the standard documents, which are outlined in the following subsection.

Required Documents

You can get by with two documents in most countries. They are:

Commercial Invoice This contains a description of the item and the value (sale price). It is provided in place of the customs invoice required by most countries.

Certificate of Origin  This document states where the item was manufactured.

NAFTA Statement If you export or import between the NAFTA countries (US, Canada, Mexico), you use the NAFTA statement instead of the certificate of origin.

There are standard form for all of these documents. You can also generate them with a computer program, which works efficiently when you export routinely each day or each week.

Attaching the Documents

You put the customs documents in an envelope and attach the envelope to the outside of the package for the item you are sending. Label the envelope “Customs Documents”. Use an address label separate and in a different place on the package from the attached envelope. Now you’re all set to send the item via any shipping method that you choose.

Shipping

Shipping via courier is fast and safe. But it’s expensive. Shipping via the post office can be the most inexpensive, but it’s not necessarily speedy. Consequently, you have to develop a strategy for shipping when you sell to customers abroad. For big ticket items, shipping by courier may not be a problem. The costs of shipping internationally as a percentage of total costs may still be low. For inexpensive items, however, you may have serious customer service problems on your hands when it comes to expensive shipping. The post office may be the only reasonable way to ship and keep the shipping costs low enough to make sense as a percentage of overall costs.

Check out the courier websites at the URLs below to determine typical shipping costs abroad.

DHL, http://www.dhl-usa.com/IntlSvcs/IntlSvcsHome .asp?nav=InternationalService

FedEx, http://fedex.com/us

Purolator, http://www.purolator.com/crossborder/index.html

UPS, http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/advi sor/index.html

Checking out the shipping costs of the couriers will give you a better overall perspective on what your shipping strategy should be. Go to the post office website to determine the international postage rates for various countries to which you anticipate you may ship products. That will give you a better overall perspective on how postal service shipping may accommodate your less expensive items. Keep in mind that once the item passes from the US Postal Service to a postal service in a foreign country, it becomes unknown how well the postal system will perform. In the first-world countries, you can expect the postal service to be efficient. In many of the third-world countries, the postal service is a question mark. Thus, how fast your item will be delivered, particularly in third-world countries, is a question that’s difficult to answer.

The post offices for the US and Canada are:

USPS, http://usps.com

Canada Post, http://www.canadapost.ca/segment-e.asp

One problem in shipping via the US Postal Service is that no insurance is provided. Although the couriers provide minimal insurance and offer the election of buying additional insurance fairly inexpensively, the Postal Service does not provide insurance. Getting insurance from the Postal Service tends to be somewhat expensive . However, there are other vendors that will provide shipping insurance significantly cheaper than the Postal Service. You will probably want to check into these insurance vendors to determine how you can provide protection for your customers at a reasonable cost.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

Is selling to customers abroad cost-effective? You bet! The real effort is in getting set up. Once you are set up to ship to customers abroad, actually doing it is just a matter of routine. It’s a little extra busy work but does not require a lot of additional effort. In fact, the more you can automate the busy work using digital techniques—such as standardized digital customs documents—the easier the fulfillment routine will be. This is clearly a means of expanding your market and expanding your sales that you will be foolish to overlook.

Again, a reminder regarding specific products. Some large and heavy products may not be suitable for overseas sales simply because they cost too much to ship via courier. For instance, an 80-pound computer monitor that you sell for $200 may cost more than that to ship overseas. So, when it comes to cost-effectiveness, you have to develop a strategy for selling abroad by analyzing the shipping costs and relating such costs to your products and the prices of your products.