Shipping internationally for the first time

Someone in Vancouver just ordered the $58 card holder and there's a customs form in front of you with a box marked "HS tariff number" and you have no idea what goes in it.

The shipping is the easy part. You buy a label, you hand it over, it goes. The hard part is that somewhere between your post office and your buyer's front door, a government is going to want money, and if your buyer doesn't know that in advance you're going to get a refund request instead of a review. So: declare the contents and the value honestly, put one plain sentence about import charges on the product page and in the order confirmation, and start with two countries rather than the whole world.

This is not a hypothetical risk that's getting smaller. The United States ended its own $800 de minimis duty exemption for low-value imports on 29 August 2025 and has kept it suspended through 2026, with Congress repealing the underlying provision for commercial shipments from 1 July 2027 (checked August 2026). Low-value parcels crossing borders duty-free is the thing that's going away, not the thing that's coming.

The three pieces of paper

Whatever carrier you use, an international parcel needs the same three things. Two of them are usually the same document printed twice.

The customs declaration. A CN22 for small, low-value parcels or a CN23 for larger ones, generated for you if you buy the label online. It asks what's inside in plain words, how many, what it weighs, what it's worth, where it was made, and the tariff code.

The commercial invoice. Three copies in a document wallet on the outside of the box for courier services. It's the same information plus your details, the buyer's details, and a line saying what the transaction was. Sold goods, not a gift.

The tariff code. Six digits, internationally standard, sometimes extended to eight or ten by the destination country. It's how the customs officer knows what duty rate to apply.

Two things people get wrong on the declaration, both expensively.

Do not write "gift" on a sold item to help your buyer dodge duty. It's a false declaration, the value thresholds for gifts are low anyway, and if the parcel is opened your buyer is the one standing there explaining it.

Do not under-declare the value. The declared value is also the maximum you can claim if the parcel is lost, so a $58 item declared at $15 is a $15 payout, and you've committed a customs offence to save your buyer maybe $4.

Finding your tariff code without guessing

The code is the six-digit Harmonized System number, and every country publishes a searchable tariff. Search the destination country's customs tariff for a plain description of your product, then check the same code against your own country's export schedule so both ends agree.

Get it as specific as you can. "Articles of leather" and "wallets, of leather" can carry different duty rates, and the vague one is not always the cheaper one. Once you've found the right code for a product, write it in the product's internal notes and never look it up again. This is a ten-minute job you do once per product line.

If you genuinely can't tell which of two codes applies, pick the more specific and be consistent. Consistency across your shipments matters more than being marginally optimal on one.

DDU, DDP, and the sentence that prevents most refund requests

There are two ways an international parcel gets charged, and you have to pick one and say which.

DDU, delivered duty unpaid. You ship it, the buyer pays whatever customs and the carrier ask for at the border. This is the default for almost every small seller and it's fine, as long as the buyer knows.

DDP, delivered duty paid. You pay it upfront, usually through the carrier, and the parcel arrives with nothing owing. Cleaner for the buyer, more setup for you, and you're guessing at a number that varies by country.

Ninety-nine percent of first-time international sellers ship DDU. The problem isn't the choice. The problem is not saying so.

Import duty and local taxes are the buyer's responsibility. That sentence, on the product page and repeated in the order confirmation, is worth more than any packaging upgrade you'll ever buy.

How the nasty surprise actually plays out

The sequence is always the same, and it's worth reading once so you recognise it.

1. Buyer orders. Pays you $58 plus $22 shipping. Happy.
2. Parcel reaches the destination country. Customs assesses duty and import tax on the goods, and often on the shipping too.
3. The carrier pays it on the buyer's behalf, then adds their own fee for having done so.
4. Buyer gets a text: "Pay $31.40 to release your parcel."
5. Buyer, who thought they'd finished paying eight days ago, feels tricked.
6. Buyer either pays and never orders again, or refuses the parcel.
7. Refused parcel is returned at your cost, or abandoned and destroyed, depending on the carrier and the country.
8. Buyer opens a dispute with you for the $80 they've already spent.

Step 4 is the one that decides everything, and step 4 happens whether or not you warned them. The only variable you control is whether the buyer saw it coming.

The fee nobody expects is not the duty

This is the part that surprises sellers every time: on a small parcel, the carrier's fee for collecting the duty is very often larger than the duty itself.

Carriers charge a customs clearance, brokerage or disbursement fee. It's usually a flat minimum or a percentage of the amount advanced, whichever is greater. So a parcel carrying $6 of actual duty can arrive with a $17 bill, of which $11 is the carrier's admin.

That changes your advice to buyers. It's not "there may be a small duty charge". It's "there may be a charge at the door, and on a small order the handling fee is usually the bigger half of it." Say the real thing.

It also changes your shipping choices. Postal services and courier services clear customs differently and charge for it differently, and on low-value parcels the postal route is often dramatically cheaper for the buyer even when your label costs the same. Ask both, for a real parcel, to a real address.

What an international parcel actually costs

Line	Who pays	Notes
Base freight	You	Weight and volumetric weight, same as domestic
Fuel surcharge	You	A percentage, revised often, quietly
Remote area surcharge	You	Applies to more addresses than you'd expect
Customs duty	Buyer, on DDU	A percentage of goods value, set by tariff code and origin
Import VAT, GST or sales tax	Buyer, on DDU	Often charged on goods plus shipping, not goods alone
Carrier clearance fee	Buyer, on DDU	Flat minimum or percentage. The bit that stings
Return leg on a refusal	You	Sometimes at full rate, sometimes not offered at all

Thresholds and duty rates change country by country and they've been moving. Do not take a number from a blog, including this one. Look up the current threshold on the destination country's own customs site the week you start shipping there, and check it again each year.

Things that will not fly

Every carrier publishes a prohibited and restricted list, and the restricted list is longer than you think. The categories that catch small sellers:

• Anything with a lithium battery. Fine by road, complicated by air, and different again if the battery is loose rather than inside the device.
• Liquids, gels and anything pressurised. Perfume, nail polish, aerosols, some cosmetics.
• Food, seeds, plants, wood and anything of animal origin. Honey, spices and leather all have rules, and they're the destination's rules, not yours.
• Alcohol. Almost always a specialist service.
• Anything with a flammable label on the safety data sheet, including some candles and some oils.

Read the list for the actual service you're buying, not the carrier in general. Air and surface have different rules, and the parcel you shipped fine last month may have gone by road.

Worked example: Marisol, leather card holders, Austin

Marisol hand-tools card holders in Austin and sells them at $58 through Instagram and a small shop page. Her first international month was seven orders, all to Canada, all shipped on a courier service at $22 flat, which she'd set by pricing one parcel and rounding up.

What happened: her real cost per parcel came in between $19.40 and $28.10 depending on the province, so she lost money on three of seven. Four buyers got a charge at the door. Two paid it. One paid it and left a review saying "great wallet, hidden fees". One refused, and the parcel came back six weeks later with a $24 return charge, so that one order cost her $46 in freight and returned $0.

Her total: $406 in goods, $154 collected in shipping, $181 in outbound freight, $24 in returns, one lost sale, one bad review.

What she changed:

1. Canada only, for three months. One tariff code, one set of rules, one carrier.
2. Two shipping rates instead of one, split by province group, priced from her own last twenty labels rather than one.
3. One line on the product page and in the confirmation email: "Shipping to Canada: duty and GST are charged on arrival and the courier adds a clearance fee, usually $15 to $30 in total. That's paid to them, not to me."
4. Postal service instead of courier for anything under $75, after quoting both.

Next quarter, 23 Canadian orders. Shipping collected covered shipping paid with $40 to spare. Two buyers mentioned the customs charge in messages, both of them to say thanks for the warning. No refusals.

The sentence about the clearance fee did more work than anything else on the list, and it took her four minutes to write.

Start with two countries, not the world

The instinct is to switch on "worldwide shipping" and see what happens. Don't. Every country is a separate set of rules, a separate duty regime, a separate set of restricted items and a separate return cost, and you'll be learning all of them at once from angry messages.

Pick the two countries you already get the most enquiries from. Learn those properly. Get the tariff code right, quote two carriers, write the customs wording, ship twenty parcels. Then add a third.

The broader question of whether selling abroad is worth it at all is a separate one, and it's in selling across borders for the first time.

What Sailo does here, and what it doesn't

You can create as many delivery methods as you want, so "Canada, standard" and "Canada, remote provinces" and "US domestic" can each be a named rate with its own fee and its own free-text estimate. The buyer picks one at checkout, and what they picked is saved on the order alongside the address, so you can see later which rate was actually chosen.

The limitation, stated plainly: Sailo does no customs work at all. There's no duty estimate, no tariff code field, no landed-cost calculation, no address validation and no way to restrict a delivery method to particular countries. Nothing stops a buyer in New Zealand selecting your Canada rate. You check the address before you print the label, or you eat the difference.

That's a real gap if international is most of your volume. If international is four orders a month, the fix is reading the country line on the order, which takes a second.

Do this before you accept the next overseas order

Look up the tariff code for your main product on the destination country's customs site and write it into your own notes. Then get a quote for one real parcel, to a real address, from both a postal service and a courier, and compare what the buyer pays at the door rather than just what you pay at the counter.

Then write your customs sentence and put it in two places: the product page and the order confirmation. The wording of that confirmation matters more than people think, and how to write an order confirmation covers what else belongs in it. When the first international parcel does go quiet, what to do when a parcel goes missing has the claim process, and if you haven't yet worked out what any of this should cost, start at how to work out delivery charges.