How to sell to another country for the first time

Someone in another country wants to buy from you. You've been selling for a year, you know how to pack a box, and suddenly you're staring at a form asking for a commodity code and a declared value and you have no idea whether saying the wrong thing gets you fined.

You're closer than you think. You need four decisions, not a customs qualification.

Declare the contents honestly, decide who pays the import charges, quote a delivery window you can survive, and pick a payment rail the buyer will actually use. That's the whole job for a first order. You don't need a company abroad, a tax number abroad, or a freight forwarder. A £24 record going from Bristol to Rotterdam is the same parcel it was domestically, with one extra piece of paper and one extra conversation.

The rest of this is the parts that go wrong, because those are the parts nobody warns you about until they've already happened.

What actually goes on the customs form

Three fields matter and people get all three wrong.

Description. Write what it is, in plain language, specifically. "Cotton T-shirt" not "clothing". "Second-hand vinyl LP record" not "goods". A vague description gets a parcel opened, held, and delayed by a week while somebody decides what it is.

Value. The real one, in the currency you sold in. Not what it cost you to make. Not a lower number to be kind to the buyer.

Reason for export. "Sale of goods" if you sold it, which you did.

The temptation is to write "gift" or knock the value down so your buyer isn't charged. Don't. It's a false declaration, and the person it lands on is the buyer, who can be penalised at the door for a form you filled in. It also destroys any insurance claim you make later, because you told the carrier the parcel was worth less than it was.

You may also be asked for a commodity code, sometimes called an HS code. It's a number describing what category of thing you're shipping, and the destination country's customs site or your own government's trade tariff tool will let you look it up in a couple of minutes. Find yours once, write it down, and reuse it forever.

The fee at the door, and who eats it

This is where first-time cross-border sellers lose reviews.

Your parcel arrives in the destination country. Customs may charge import duty, import tax, or both, plus the carrier's own handling fee for collecting them. Somebody pays that. Either you paid it in advance when you shipped, or your buyer is asked for it before the courier will hand the box over.

The second version is a bad day. A buyer who paid £24 and is then asked for another £11 on the doorstep feels cheated, and they're not wrong, because nobody told them.

Two workable approaches:

Say it plainly and let the buyer pay. One line on your page: "Orders outside the UK may be charged import duty and tax on arrival. These are set by your country and are not included in the price." Blunt, honest, and it protects you. Most buyers accept it if they see it before they pay, and almost none accept it after.

Pay it upfront yourself. Some carriers offer this. You pay the estimated charges at shipping and the buyer receives the parcel with nothing to pay. It's a better experience and it costs more, and you should only do it once you know the numbers for that destination.

What you must not do is stay silent and hope. Silence converts a happy customer into a refund request and a one-star review.

And do not assume a small parcel travels tax-free. Several markets have changed or removed their low-value import exemptions in recent years, so check the destination country's own customs authority for what applies today rather than trusting a figure in an article, including this one.

Every unhappy cross-border customer I've seen was surprised by a charge, not by a price.

The money, and the transfer that arrives short

This one catches everybody exactly once.

Your buyer in Rotterdam sends you £180 by international bank transfer. £167.40 lands. Nobody stole anything. Two intermediary banks took a fee each on the way through, and there was a conversion spread you never saw quoted. Now you're short, the buyer is certain they paid in full, and both of you are right.

Decide before it happens whose problem that is, and write it on the page. "Please select the option where the sender pays all charges" is a sentence worth having. So is "if the amount received is short by more than a few pounds, we'll ask you to top it up before dispatch." Neither is rude. Both are far better than the argument.

Cross-border payment options, roughly in order of how much friction they put on the buyer:

Rail	What it costs you	What it costs the buyer
Card	Highest fees, but predictable	Nothing. They tap and it's done
International bank transfer	Fees arrive as a short payment	Effort, and often a fee of their own
A cross-border payment app	Varies, usually cheap	They need the same app
Cash on delivery	Not usually available across borders	Not an option to plan around

For a buyer who has never heard of you, in a country you've never shipped to, card is genuinely the rail that converts. This is one of the few situations where the card fee is clearly worth paying, because the alternative is asking a stranger abroad to send money into a foreign account on trust.

Stripe's UK pricing page in August 2026 listed cards issued outside the EEA at 3.15% + 20p, EEA cards at 2.5% + 20p, and a further 2% where a currency has to be converted. So a cross-border card order costs meaningfully more than a domestic one, and you should know that before you price international shipping. How payment fees eat a small order shows how much of that lands on a small basket.

Pricing in their currency or yours

You can do either, and the trade is clear.

Price in your own currency and you always know what you're getting. The buyer sees a foreign number, does mental arithmetic, and eats the conversion on their card statement. This is fine and most small sellers do it.

Price in theirs and you convert better, because the number feels real to them, and you take the exchange rate risk. If your costs are in a currency that moves a lot against theirs, that risk is not theoretical. Selling in a currency that moves covers how to price when the ground shifts under you.

Whichever you choose, put a date on your international price list and give yourself permission to change it. Buyers accept a dated price changing. They don't accept feeling misled.

Delivery windows you can defend

Domestic delivery estimates are mostly about the courier. International estimates are about the courier plus a customs queue you cannot see or influence.

So quote a range, quote it wide, and quote the worst case as the number. "7 to 14 working days, and customs clearance can add to that" is a promise you'll keep. "About a week" is a promise you'll break roughly a third of the time, and every break costs you a message thread.

Track everything. An untracked international parcel that goes missing is a total loss and an unwinnable conversation, because you cannot prove it left and they cannot prove it didn't arrive. The tracking upgrade costs a few pounds and it is not optional on a cross-border order.

Shipping internationally for the first time goes deeper into carriers, services and paperwork than I can here.

Worked example: Tom, second-hand vinyl, Bristol

Tom sells second-hand records. £24 average, about 90 a month, almost all UK. His first international order was a £58 two-record order to Rotterdam.

What happened: he shipped it untracked to save £6, wrote "records" on the customs form with a value of £58, and quoted "about a week". It took 16 days. The buyer was charged import VAT plus a handling fee on arrival, which Tom hadn't mentioned. The buyer paid it, was annoyed, and never came back.

Nothing there was dishonest. All of it was avoidable.

What he does now, on every non-UK order:

• Tracked service only, cost built into the shipping charge rather than absorbed.
• Customs description: "Used vinyl LP records, second-hand". Value: the sale price.
• One line at checkout and one line in the confirmation message: "Import duty and VAT may be charged on arrival in your country. These aren't included."
• Delivery quoted as 7 to 21 days for Europe, with the range explained.
• Card only for first-time international buyers. Bank transfer is fine for the four European regulars who've bought from him a dozen times.

His international orders are now about 15 a month, which is roughly 14% of his volume and closer to 20% of his revenue, because the international buyers tend to buy the more expensive records. His refund rate on those is lower than his domestic rate, which surprised him, and the reason is that people who go to the trouble of buying a record from another country really want that record.

The thing that changed most: he stopped absorbing shipping. He'd been quietly eating £4 to £7 per international order to keep the price attractive, which on a £24 record is most of the margin. Charging the real cost lost him almost no orders.

A second one, going the other way

Njeri sells beaded jewellery from Nairobi and gets a steady trickle of orders from Kenyans living in London and Toronto. Her problem is the opposite of Tom's: her buyers already trust her, often because they know her family, so payment isn't the obstacle. Delivery is.

She quotes 10 to 21 days, ships tracked, and takes payment in full before anything moves, because a returned parcel from Canada costs more than the jewellery. She prices in KSh and tells buyers what it'll be roughly in their currency, and she's completely upfront that customs may charge them.

Different market, different obstacle, same three fixes: declare honestly, warn about charges, get paid before you ship.

When not to bother

The honest answer that costs Sailo a sale: if your item is low value, heavy, fragile, or perishable, cross-border is probably not worth it for you yet.

A £9 mug that costs £18 to send tracked to Germany, arrives in three weeks, and might get the buyer a customs bill is not a business. Some products simply don't travel, and there is no clever fix. Sell them locally, well, and revisit when your average order value can carry the freight.

The products that work across borders share features: high value relative to weight, not fragile, not perishable, and hard to buy locally. If yours has none of those, the answer is to say no politely and keep the relationship.

Where Sailo fits, and what it can't do

Sailo gives you the shop page in 35 languages, so a buyer in Rotterdam or Riyadh can read your product names and prices in theirs. Orders arrive with the item, the options, the full address and the total already written out, which matters more on an international order than a domestic one, because a mistyped address abroad is a parcel you'll never see again.

The limits, plainly:

Sailo does not calculate duties or destination taxes. There's no landed-cost engine. The warning line about import charges is a sentence you write yourself, and you should write it.

Card carries 1–3% of the goods, and needs a Stripe account Stripe has cleared for charges. Stripe's own availability varies a lot by country, so check that your country is covered before you plan an international strategy around cards. For sellers in several large markets, it isn't.

Sailo cannot tell you an international transfer arrived, or that it arrived short. Only your bank can. That check is yours, and on cross-border transfers it genuinely matters, for the reason in the section above.

What to do next

Pick one country you already get messages from, and do the boring version of this properly for that country alone. Look up your commodity code. Get a real tracked shipping quote to a real address there. Read the destination's customs page for what a parcel of your value gets charged.

Write the answers into three sentences on your page: shipping cost, delivery range, and a warning about import charges. Then take one order and see what actually happens.

One country, done properly, teaches you more than a global shipping policy written from guesses. If you want the wider picture of what buyers in different places expect before they'll order at all, what buyers expect in different countries is worth reading before you write that page, and how to take payment as a small seller covers which rail to offer a buyer who has never met you.