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Domestic shipping bills you once. International shipping bills you in stages — freight, duty, tax, brokerage, disbursement — and several of those land days or weeks later, sometimes on your customer rather than you. Most cross-border complaints trace back to that one difference.
Choosing a network
The two networks are built for different jobs, and the cheaper one on paper is often the more expensive one in practice.
| Postal / mail networks | Private courier | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost on light parcels | Usually the cheapest option under a few pounds | Higher base cost, better rate structure at weight |
| Transit time | Slower and more variable; handed between postal operators at the border | Faster and far more predictable; one operator end to end |
| Tracking | Often limited or ends at the border, depending on destination | Full event-level tracking to delivery |
| Customs handling | Cleared by the destination postal service; duties usually collected from the recipient | Broker acts on your behalf; duties can be billed to you or the recipient |
| Claims and recourse | Limited liability, slow resolution, little visibility | Structured claims process with documented evidence requirements |
| Best used for | Low-value, low-weight, non-urgent parcels where a slower transit is acceptable | Higher-value goods, time-sensitive orders, anything you cannot afford to lose |
The practical answer for most sellers is not one or the other. It is a rule that sends light, low-value parcels to a postal network and everything else to a courier, applied automatically at order entry rather than decided per shipment.
The charges after the freight
Brokerage is the work of clearing your goods through customs. It is charged separately from transportation, and it rarely arrives as a single line.
The core brokerage charge for preparing and filing the customs entry. On express services a simple entry is often bundled into the freight rate; on freight shipments and on complex entries it is billed separately and can be substantial.
When the carrier pays duty and tax to the authorities on your behalf, it charges a fee for fronting that money — typically a percentage of the amount advanced with a minimum. On low-value shipments the fee frequently exceeds the duty itself.
Entries beyond a set number of line items attract per-line charges. A mixed consignment with many different products costs meaningfully more to clear than a single-product one, which is worth knowing before you consolidate orders.
If a shipment is held — missing paperwork, an inspection, an unpaid duty invoice — storage accrues daily at the facility. These charges are avoidable and they are the ones that turn a small problem into an expensive one.
Terms of sale
This is the single most consequential choice in cross-border e-commerce, and it is usually made by default rather than deliberately.
You pay the freight. Your customer pays the duty, the tax and the brokerage fees, and they find out about it when the carrier contacts them for payment before delivery.
It is cheaper for you at checkout and it is why so many sellers use it. It is also the single largest source of refused deliveries, chargebacks and one-star reviews in cross-border selling. The customer bought at one price and is being asked for another.
A refused DDU parcel does not simply come back either — you typically pay return freight, and sometimes the duty anyway.
You pay the freight, the duty, the tax and the brokerage. The customer pays what they saw at checkout and the parcel arrives with nothing further to settle.
It costs more per order and requires you to calculate landed cost at checkout, which means correct HS classification on your catalogue. In exchange you get the conversion rate, the delivery rate and the review scores of a domestic experience.
For any repeat-purchase category, DDP almost always wins once refused deliveries and support load are counted honestly.
Some sellers run DDP into their largest markets, where volume justifies the setup work, and DDU into the long tail. That is a defensible position — what is not defensible is running DDU everywhere by accident and treating the refusals as a cost of doing business.
Dimensional weight abroad
Your domestic divisor does not necessarily apply to your international shipments, and shippers regularly assume it does.
International services are commonly rated on a metric divisor — centimetres divided by a figure such as 5,000 or 6,000 — rather than the cubic-inch divisor used domestically. Whether you hold a negotiated international divisor at all, and what it is, is a distinct line in your agreement.
The effect is the same as it is domestically: a lower divisor means more billable weight on every light, bulky parcel. The difference is that international rates per pound are far higher, so the same volume of air costs considerably more to send abroad.
If you ship bulky product internationally, check whether your agreement specifies an international dimensional divisor separately. If it is silent, you are on the published figure.
When it goes wrong
Clearance failures follow a predictable sequence, and the cost escalates at every stage. Knowing the sequence is what lets you intervene early.
Customs flags the entry — commonly a missing or inconsistent commercial invoice, an incorrect or missing HS code, an undervalued declaration, or goods requiring a licence or certificate that was not supplied. The parcel stops moving and storage begins accruing.
The broker contacts you or your customer for the missing document or clarification. This is the cheapest point to resolve it and the point most often missed, because the request goes to an address nobody monitors. Every day of delay adds storage.
On a DDU shipment the carrier now asks your customer to pay before delivery. A meaningful proportion refuse, either because the amount is unexpected or because they assume it is a scam message.
After the clearance window expires, goods are returned at your cost, abandoned to the authorities, or destroyed. Return freight on an international parcel frequently exceeds the value of what is inside it, which is why abandonment is sometimes the rational choice.
Storage, return freight and in some cases the original duty are still billed to you. This is the outcome that turns a $40 order into a $200 loss, and it is entirely preventable with correct classification and a monitored broker contact address.
Accurate HS codes on your catalogue, a commercial invoice that matches the shipment, honest declared values, and a monitored email address for broker queries prevent the large majority of clearance failures.
Send us a recent international invoice. We will separate freight from duty, tax, brokerage and disbursement, and show you what DDP would change.