On the fly postage costs if outside EU?

[FuturityLimited]

Hi,

I'm still evaluating Actinic business and I've very pleased with Actinic's versatile postage calculations

However, my client doesn't currently know all the postage rates for every combination of weight to every country in the world, but they will want to ship world wide. What they would like to do is get non EU customers to phone up for a postage quote rather than them have to enter and maintain all the postage combinations worldwide.

To do this could we offer either:

a: take the order if its destined for a country outside the EU, but present a page asking the customer to phone the office for a postage quote. if they are happy with the quote, payment will be taken over the phone.

b: take the order but let the customer know showhow that we will phone them with a postage quote and take payment manually.

c: present a page with a postage amount field asking the customer to phone up for a postage quote. They will then enter the amount into the form and submit it. They will subsequently be presented with a total including this postage amount which they can pay for online. This could be open to abuse, but my client feels they would be able to double check postage on non EU orders as they came in.

Does anyone know how i could implement any of these or if there a better solution to handling non EU postage costs on the fly? I don't mind editing scripts if necessary.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Regards

Neil

[pinbrook]

You don't say what type of item you will be shipping, if its uniform then you really ought to bite the bullet and work out shipping costs and finalise the order oline.

I would not order from a site where I had to phone to find out shipping cost, especially if I were in the EU and didn't speak english. It somewhat defeats the object of online shopping, I might aswell phone you to place the order. I often shop online out of business hours, and would not want to follow up the following day, I'd go to one of your competitors.

I've seen other sites, say they will confirm a shipping cost before processing payment, these sites then email a shipping quote, the customer then accepts or declines the order. Ignoring the quote also results in a decline.

[NormanRouxel]

As Jo says, requiring people to phone will lose you a lot of business.

Don't forget that worldwide time differences (New Zealand e.g.) mean that you'd need a 24 hour helpline.

One site I'm familiar with, simply says that Standard Worldwide cost £xxx and that certain bulky or heavy items will require a surcharge which will be asked for by e-mail before proceeding with processing the Credit Card.

[chris ashdown]

Without knowledge of the product it's hard to say.

But are you really selling worldwide or just to a few countries where say expats work or live.

You may well find that the worldwide comes down to say something like USA, Canada, Japan, Malaya, Singapor, Australia, New Zealand and a few Arab country's

If you just start with the contrys you think will have customers you can then add on when you look at your stats and find what countries are looking at your site

Alternatively you can work out the weight of the package and also show on the site a abridged table which is a copy of the world zones and prices from the post office publications, you would not need to include all weights just say under 250 grm, 250-500, 1 kg, 2kg, 5kg ext. so they can estimate the cost themselves

[BevS97]

I have my site set up for all countries and weights - there are only 3 zones and about 15 weight levels for each zone and then after that it's xpence per 250g. It took me about an hour to set them all up and it's well worth it to be able to give everyone an immediate quote. We've had orders from some countries that I would have never predicted (libya most recently)