Chapter 19 Configuring Shipping, Taxes, and Inventory S
o you’ve created a store. You have products, categories, and various information pages. You’ve set up your payment methods and your order forms. Finished? Not quite. You still have to set up various details: where you are willing to ship, what shipping methods and rates you will use, how you will handle sales tax, what will be in your confirmation e-mails, and how you will manage inventory.
Specifying Where You Ship—Foreign Orders You need to define what countries you are willing to sell to, so that your customers see the correct address options when they check out. Where you are willing to ship to is dependent to a great degree on what kind of product you are selling. Is it very expensive to ship overseas? Will the product require large import duties when arriving in the country? Is it a product with a high fraud rate? When a buyer claims a credit-card transaction was fraudulent, you lose the price of the product and the cost of shipping, and also you must pay a chargeback fee. So, overseas shipments are even more expensive as a loss than domestic shipments. In addition, foreign orders have a much higher fraud rate, perhaps 2.5 times the domestic rates (although rates vary greatly in different areas around the world). Indeed, one study found that 10 percent of Internet merchants that used to ship overseas have stopped doing so because fraud losses outweighed the profits.
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