International Shipping - why so expensive?

Craig Ridley

I have been playing around with alternative payment methods to the Smugmug cart (via Paypal - but still work in progress) in order to offer prices in Australian dollars. I was doing this to avoid confusion with smugmug prices in US$ but then I realised that with the strength of the Australian dollar there is realy not much price difference so perhaps I should not worry too much.

Great I thought, lets work out how expensive the shipping is. OMG! I added a 6" x 4" print to my cart and proceeded through checkout to find out that the basic international shipping cost was $29.95. I could not believe shipping was this expensive for a simple print.

Last night I ordered a book via Blurb and their basic international shipping cost was only $11.90. Fine, I would probably not order only one 6" x 4" print but the smugmug shipping price was a bit of a shock compared to having an entire photo book shipped.

I know this is not isolated to just Australia as the smugmug shipping page states many other countries are 2-3 times the US shipping cost, but really. Why is this so?

Oh well, I guess it is back to finishing my paypal shopping cart and the implementation of self-fulfillment.

Finally: On a similar note, I was very uncomfortable in entering my credit card details before I even knew the final price. Why do you need credit card information prior to calculating the shipping costs?

ivar

Craig Ridley wrote:

Great I thought, lets work out how expensive the shipping is. OMG! I added a 6" x 4" print to my cart and proceeded through checkout to find out that the basic international shipping cost was $29.95. I could not believe shipping was this expensive for a simple print.

I'm not sure what happened with your order there, but when I order a 4x6 to be sent to Oz, these are my options:

Craig Ridley

ivar wrote:

I'm not sure what happened with your order there, but when I order a 4x6 to be sent to Oz, these are my options:

Ivar, thanks for the post.

To be honest I now remember getting the four options but went straight to the international labelled items as that is what I needed "international postage". When I saw your post I went and read the smugmug shipping page in more detail and now understand the four options are in fact valid for international shipping with the difference being:

Airmail - i.e. Regular post
International - i.e. Fedex

So I guess my question is now, does it really matter between regular post and fedex? I guess you are paying extra for a faster and trackable delivery.

glasbergen

Shipping costs happen to be the same to the Netherlands, only your cheapest option has disappeared for us. Not very encouraging...

StephaneBosman

I used to think so as well
I just terminated my account with exposuremanager.com because of shipping problems.

Exposuremanager only offers USPS (cheap) shipping.

I got an order (that felt really good!) from a customer in Germany. The customer never received the prints. Exposuremanager resent the prints the same way (despite me begging them to use UPS or Fedex or similar, offering to pay for it) and the customer never received them either.

The problem is not USPS. The problem is the european local posts on whom USPS relies for local delivery. In many European countries they are not reliable at all.

So it is very good that Smugmug offers a choice. It makes the customer responsible to decide to pay for service or take a chance and relieves the photographer from the blame.