Duties, Taxes, Global Payment - Show #89

Tiffanie Archie worked for UPS in global logistics and now she’s the Strategic Partner Manager for Zonos.  If you want to know about shipping or international payments, she’s the person to talk to.  This is a very informative episode of the Global Marketing Show podcast with several key take-aways. 

First off, if you are an ecommerce company of any size, you can export.  Zonos works with companies of all sizes and simplifies the payments, duties, and tax maze.  

Second, you need to figure out where you want to sell.  Stephanie suggests you do the following for logistics and payments: 

1. Figure out where your products are in demand 
2. Consider shipping lanes – the more frequent the shipping lanes, the cheaper the costs 
3. Do your tax, duty, and VAT research 
4. Determine what payment methods the local market prefers 

Figuring out your tax, duty, and VAT on your own can be complex - You can work with your logistics provider to give you “shipping costs” yet be careful, since that may not include taxes and duties.   

You can either use the Harmonized Codes from the “black box” provided by the government or get the massive hard copy book to find your 10-digit product number to calculate the tax costs.   

Or you can find and ask partners such as a logistics company, an export advisor, your state trade representation, export broker, or you can use Zonos who continually updates and calculates the full “Landed Cost Calculation” price for your customers at check out. 

Third, be aware of miscoding your products.  Mistakes do happen, yet if you give a detailed code and you include documentation to answer the following questions, the officials are more likely to believe your company is legitimate.   

1. What is the product? 
2. What is it made of? 
3. What is it used for?

If you get flagged, you may have trouble forever more since you’ve been labeled as non-compliant. 

Fourth, watch the currency exchange.  This can be complicated so Tiffanie simplified it. To keep it simple for a busy business owner, she suggested that you do the following: 

1. Watch the news.  Keep abreast of current events that could affect your target markets. 
2. Offer your customers a way to pay that is convenient for them.  With Zonos’s partnership with Opti, users can test different payment options in different markets. 
3. Watch foreign exchange rates.  She suggested checking it once a month to see if you need to adjust your pricing to be competitive or profitable.  

And, finally, she recommended that you watch out for DDU and DDP.  DDU refers to products delivered to consumers when the duties are unpaid.  Abandonment and refusals are much more common when duties are unpaid which leave the seller responsible for the duties and return costs.  Versus DDP which means the duties are paid. 

If you are in marketing and responsible for the 4 P’s, this is a good episode to learn about Price and Place for global marketing.  As for the other 2 P’s – the types of Products that can be exported and how to create and translate Promotion materials – listen to other episodes of the Global Marketing Show.   

 

Links: 

www.zonos.com 

 

Connect with Wendy - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendypease/ 

Connect with Tiffanie - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffaniearchie/  

Music: Fiddle-De-Dee by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com