International Shipping

Here is a dilemma and solution to international shipping cost.  We used to have international shipping charges determined by PC.  However we ended up loosing money because PC does not add shipping weight for the box etc.  So what we did was turn off the shipping calculation and PC will display "shipping to be determined".  After that we put the stuff onto the scale, figured out shipping and told the customer how much.  They then could decide, if they wanted it or not.  It was never a problem with off line credit card processing or paypal (send a second request for shipping cost).  It did turn out to be a problem with the payment gateway, since you cannot increase the pre authorized amount.  The gateway does not show us the complete credit card either so we could not do a second charge either.  So we started to think what we could do. 

Here is the solution:
1. Go into the back office, create another category in the root directory called "International Shipping", and mark it not to show in the store front.  That way other customers don't see or play with it.
2. Add a product with the SKU intership (or whatever you like it to be called), mark this no shipping and have it placed into the new category.  We typed into the product title "International Shipping for order # - Customer Name".  That way the customer knows it is his/her shipping cost.  Write something nice into the description and that is it.  Zero weight and zero reward points.
3. Go to Marketing, click on generate store link, and find the link for the intership product.  Cut this one and save to your email program.  This will be the link you will be sending to your customer to pay for the extra shipping. 
4. Send the link to your customer, he/or she accepts the shipping by simply paying for it.  They don't pay, you cancel the order and refund the product cost to them.
5. It can be used over and over.  For the next customer simply modify the product "intership" and adjust the shipping cost and name.  Best you don't have to turn it inactive after use since it is not visible in the store front.  Turn it off after payment, if you like to.
6. You can clone this product, if you happen to have more then one customer shipping requests.  Make sure to copy the new url for the clone.

Hope this is useful for some of the other product cart users.
Katharina

I will use your suggestion.

Recently, I have started switching a lot of my international orders to USPS 1st class International with good success. Just recently Stamps.com have enabled this class of post to also be used without displaying the postage.

I'm glad to hear that it gets such good response.  We just had to find a way to get around this issue.  Now we can calculate actual shipping and don't loose money on the few international orders we have.  Also we were not willing to call each one of them overseas to get their credit card information for the shipping cost.  This method can also be used for custom invoicing I would say. 
Katharina

I agree on this one, but we were loosing money on shipping.  We state on our site that only actual shipping cost will be applied.  Those that aren't sure usually email and ask us before ordering.  This option worked out the best for us, plus the customer can cancel at anytime.  We never just charged someone without their consent.  So far everyone is happy and they all find the shipping cost to be fine.
Katharina