Here's an idea:

What if we bundled swag store orders to a particular country so the cost of shipping everything gets spread across?

Although I don't live in a central area of the UK, I'd volunteer to receive multiple orders and then further post them to their final destinations. Posting locally is definitely cheaper, so if the math is done right, everybody wins.

:)

@vinerz Well yeah, but have you seen the case of the ranter whose landlord opened their mail and effectively stole their stickers? The ranter promptly ranted about it and @dfox swiftly replied. I mean, it'll be easy to track the main receiver in a country (gotta have his/her address after all) and ban them at least. Although this isn't a proper disincentive, it also means the scammer would have only one successful scam. And I doubt people would do that for $30/40 worth of swag.

It's a really good thought, and we appreciate the idea, but the truth is, logistically, it still makes international shipping very difficult and expensive.

Right now we use USPS. All international packages cost $13.50 to ship, and that's only up to half a pound. A major issue is after that, the rates go up very quickly. Shipping someone a bundle of stuff via USPS more or less costs the same as it would to do individually.

Then comes carriers like UPS/freight purchasing. They can take some more weight without jacking up the price a ton, but the rates more or less start at like $50-$100 for a shipment. So that being the case, the only way this option is economical is if we shipped a lot of inventory, which starts getting really messy in itself.

Then, add on the task of managing the international inventory, updating it with new products, restocking, etc, - it becomes a full time job to manage the shop.

Crap.

But I still volunteer anyway! :)

@BellAppLab thank you :) we'll try to figure something out. There are options of using companies that do international fulfillment, but that takes some logistical work too.

I'm just curious, is there any specific combination of items you wanted to buy and thought the shipping was too high? Right now some of our t-shirts might have too high of weights assigned for their shipping weights, making international shipping seem more expensive. We're working to get those weights correct asap as we learn what they actually are.

@BellAppLab You da real mvp 😉

@dfox putting up the stores and full-time job thing is not a bad idea, it could be a real business for example say in India!

@dfox No specific combination. I just wanted to drop you guys a couple spare bucks every now and then while still getting some cool swag in return while also not diverting the bulk of my contribution to freight.

There should be an app for that.

@noda Would love to help with that as well!

We might have had a breakthrough on international shipping. More info in a bit when we know more.

On second look, might not work what we were thinking :/

git checkout master && git branch -d quickfix && git checkout -b letstryagain

@BellAppLab haha! And btw what you said makes sense - more items with very cheap international shipping would be good I think. Right now the shipping on the stickers is really cheap, but I realize people want more tangible items too.

A few people have actually suggested compressing the squishy balls which would make them significantly cheaper to ship :) but not sure what condition they'd be on the other end lol.

Let's set up a test sub-storage-house! And buy some vacuum bags.