Dos and Don'ts of International Shipping

Hi there! I’m back with a blog post that has been on my mind for a long time. This post isn’t directed at anybody in particular; it’s meant to be helpful for anyone who doesn’t know about this topic and wants to learn. My experiences and the interactions I’ve witnessed on Instagram suggest that some guidance on this subject is sorely needed. If you find yourself selling doll items to other collectors, even occasionally, this post is for you. Without further ado, here are the dos and don’ts of international shipping, especially as they pertain to the doll hobby.

Dos

1. Do offer international shipping. Americans, this is mostly directed at you. Most collectors from other countries sell internationally because they simply would not have enough potential buyers otherwise. Americans are lucky to have a large domestic market for their sales, but some of you also seem reluctant to acknowledge that other countries have functional postal systems. I’ve heard all sorts of excuses for not offering international shipping so I’d like to address them individually.
• “I don’t know how international shipping works.” As I’ve said many times, it’s okay to not know things! But that doesn’t mean you need never learn. International shipping might seem confusing at first but it’s not difficult. There’s some helpful information on the USPS website. If you have a specific question that the USPS website doesn’t answer, google it, stop into your local post office and ask, or message a doll friend for help.
• “I’m afraid packages will get lost in the mail.” Lost packages are a risk you take whenever you mail anything anywhere; there’s no reason to be more afraid of this when mailing internationally. You probably have heard more stories of packages getting lost when they cross international borders but those stories are likely inaccurate (more on that later). If your potential buyer is willing to take the (low) risk, you should be too.
• “International shipping is more expensive.” I hear this excuse all the time and it confuses the heck out of me. If the buyer is paying for shipping, this doesn’t affect you at all! Again, if the potential buyer is willing, you should be too.
• “I’m afraid I’ll have problems with international buyers.” As my good friend @lambys_dollies pointed out to me, there are some doll hobbyists who are rightly concerned about scamming but wrongly address their concerns by acting with prejudice towards international hobbyists, especially those living in Asia. This is not okay. Asian doll collectors are not more likely to scam you than anyone else is. (For the record, all the doll-hobby scams I’ve heard about were carried out by Americans or Canadians.) Note: I suspect a factor in this excuse might be people confusing scamming with bootlegging. Scamming is when someone tricks you out of money or goods. It may take the form of lying, sob stories, swapping one product for another, or making false claims to PayPal, eBay, etc. Bootlegging (sometimes called “recasting” in the BJD hobby) is when a shady company copies an artist’s work without their permission and sells cheap knockoffs. It’s true that these shady companies are mostly located in China, but scamming and bootlegging are two separate issues and Asian doll hobbyists are not more likely to be scammers or bootleggers.
• “It’s more time-consuming for me to ship internationally.” I’ll allow that this might be true since you must fill out a customs declaration form for international mail. But do you really not have 5-10 minutes to spare for someone who is paying you money? If you’re that crunched for time, you might need to rethink the timing of your sales in general and offer them when you’re less busy. Note: if you can mail domestic packages directly from your home but must go to the post office to send international packages, okay, this statement is reasonable. But please let people know!
2. Do be accurate and specific on the customs declaration form. “Dolls” isn’t good enough. “Secondhand dolls” is better. “Five secondhand Barbie dolls and two secondhand doll outfits” is best. You want to give customs agents little to question and nothing to be surprised about if they choose to open the package.
3. Do pack well. Packages shipped abroad must travel great distances and probably by several different means. This means that whatever is inside must be protected. Use lightweight packing material like bubble wrap; don’t use heavy material like newspaper as it will increase the cost of shipping for your buyer. Wrap dolls in white tissue paper to protect them from stains and scratches before you place them in the box. Use tape to hold everything in place. Choose a box that’s an appropriate size and shape—neither too big nor too small—for what you’re mailing. Recycled packaging is totally fine! I’ve mailed many things and I’m not sure I’ve ever bought packing material. Just make sure you remove or cover all addresses and barcodes on reused boxes. If you order doll stuff online, save the boxes, bubble wrap, packing peanuts, tissue paper, etc. and reuse them. (I have seen people complain about recycled packaging not being “pretty enough” but that’s just entitled and weird.) Finally, include a paper or card inside the box, right on top, with your name and address and the name and address of the recipient printed clearly on it. If the box gets damaged or opened (very unlikely), this will help postal workers make sure it still gets where it needs to go.
4. Do use your government’s postal system or DHL. Your country’s postal system is…well, it’s complicated, but it’s different from a purely for-profit system like UPS or FedEx in ways that  usually make it a superior choice. DHL is good too because it’s a sophisticated and explicitly international organization. Choose one of these two when possible.
5. Do get tracking. This protects both you and the buyer in the unlikely event that something goes wrong. Share the tracking number with your buyer as soon as you ship; a picture of the receipt is better than a typed number. Keep the tracking receipt until the buyer has received the package.
6. Do be patient. I cannot stress this enough! International shipping takes time. Familiarize yourself with the customs process. Packages that cross international borders must be inspected to make sure a) they do not contain prohibited substances and b) import duties are charged where applicable. Tracking will often show that a package arrives at a port of entry and then stops for several days to several weeks. This is usually what prompts naïve sellers and buyers to declare that a package is “lost.” If your package stalls, check the complete tracking history. What is its last recorded location? If it’s a large and/or border city in your country or a large and/or border city in the destination country, the package is almost certainly going through the customs process and you have nothing to worry about. If a package stalls at the border, yes, it’s annoying, but it’s no reason to panic. Please do not badger your buyer for updates or vow never to ship internationally again because it’s “just so unreliable.” Be patient. Following guidelines 3-6 will help this process go as smoothly as possible.
7. Do be aware that you might need to work a little harder to find tracking information when a package crosses an international border. Occasionally, tracking will appear to stop updating when a package arrives in its destination country. You’re probably just looking for information in the wrong place. When you ship from the US to Canada using USPS, for example, the package switches carriers at the border: USPS hands it over to Canada Post. The USPS website will stop showing tracking updates but if you enter the same tracking number into the Canada Post website, you’ll see the tracking information there. (Canada Post is nicer and lets you track a package all the way to a destination in the States.)
8. Do take some responsibility for missing items. There’s a technical reason for this: in the unlikely event that something goes wrong, you as the shipper are required to make contact with the postal service to resolve the issue. The postal service won’t talk to the person waiting to receive the item; they need to talk to you. Usually, a phone call or two is all that’s required of you (the item is probably just stuck temporarily in customs).
9. Do stay in communication with your buyer. As stated above, you need to be available to contact the postal service if something goes wrong. And of course, letting your buyer know when you can ship, when you have shipped, what their tracking number is, etc. is just good etiquette no matter where you’re sending something.

Don’ts

1. Don’t overstate the value of the item(s) on the customs declaration form! This is one of the most important pieces of advice in this whole blog post, so I’m going to break it down.
• When you fill out the customs declaration form, you must write down the value of the item(s) in the package. This is whatever the buyer paid for the item(s) and no more. If you sold an American Girl doll for $60, the declared value must be $60. It’s not $98 because that’s what American Girl dolls cost new. It’s not $200 because you hoped to get $200 for the doll or because you’ve seen the doll go for $200 on eBay. It’s not $82.19 because the buyer paid you $60 for the doll and $22.19 for shipping—do not include the price of shipping in your declaration! It’s a $60 purchase so the declared value must be $60.
• The declared value of the item(s) is used to calculate import duties. Import duties are taxes the government charges on packages received from abroad.
• The buyer is responsible for paying import duties. That’s why it’s so important for you, the seller, to be honest and accurate when you declare the value of the item(s). If your buyer purchased a $60 item but you tell their government it cost $200, you’ve stuck your buyer with an unfair and inaccurate tax burden.
• The declared value of an item has absolutely nothing to do with insurance or safety. “If I say this $60 item is worth $200,” some people think, “the postal service will be extra careful with it!” Nope. You’re just sticking your buyer with an unfair and inaccurate tax burden. If your buyer requests package insurance, charge them for package insurance and buy package insurance. It’s a totally separate thing.
• If for some reason you ignore my advice and over-declare, take responsibility. Refund your buyer the taxes they paid on that extra $140 and don’t do it again.
2. Don’t ship UPS. UPS is a for-profit company that tries to extract as much money as possible from both shipper and recipient. I’ll give you an example. I once bought an American Girl doll from a seller in the States. I paid $40 for the doll and $20 or so for shipping. When the seller took the package to UPS, they were talked into paying extra money for some kind of unnecessary package protection. Then, when the package arrived at my door, UPS insisted on collecting import duties. Import duties are legal and expected, but the Canadian government rarely collects them on packages under $100 if those packages are shipped via USPS to Canada Post. UPS makes sure they’re collected on every package because UPS charges their own “processing fee” to administer import duties. That “processing fee” is sky-high: I paid about $4 to the Canadian government in import duties and $40 in UPS “processing fees.” Ultimately, I paid about $104 for my $40 doll and the seller only made about $20 profit. Don’t let this happen. I suspect FedEx is the same way, so be safe and use your government’s postal service or DHL.
3. Don’t offer arbitrary reasons why you’ll ship to one international country but not another. Frankly, this makes you look xenophobic. For a while, Pullip Style had a short list of countries to which they would not ship. The statement on their website explained that these countries had known problems with fraud and bribery that had negatively impacted both Pullip Style and their customers in those countries. These restrictions were temporary; Pullip Style now ships everywhere in the world, presumably because the fraud and bribery problems have been resolved or because Pullip Style was able to upgrade their business insurance to deal with them. Pullip Style’s shipping restrictions were neither arbitrary nor permanent. Unless you’re a business like Pullip Style and you have a very good reason to avoid shipping to a specific country, don’t.
4. Don’t be ignorant or rude about other countries (or your own!). Canada is not part of the US. Canadians will not thank you for making an exception to your US-only policy “because Canada is basically part of the US.” And don’t say, “Well, I ship to Canada because Canada shares a border with the US”; I see you not extending that same logic to Mexico. Puerto Rico is a territory of the US. If you ship USPS to Puerto Rico, it’s considered domestic mail and the package will travel USPS the whole way! Hawai’i and Alaska are US states, for goodness’ sake. I’ve seen multiple Alaskan doll collectors complain that fellow Americans are unaware of this! If you lack familiarity with basic geopolitical realities, you should probably correct this before you ship anything anywhere.
5. Don’t insist that buyers pay with PayPal Friends and Family. I realize that some people will disagree with this advice. It’s common practice, especially in the reborn community, for sellers to insist that buyers transfer hundreds if not thousands of dollars via Friends and Family. I have a problem with this. If you ask buyers to pay Friends and Family, you are passing sellers’ fees off on buyers. International buyers are already paying additional PayPal fees for currency conversion. I recognize that sellers’ fees are annoying but if you need more money to account for them, raise your prices. When you ask buyers to pay Friends and Family, you are asking them to take a huge risk. Friends and Family does not offer the same buyer protection that Goods and Services does. Selling a doll that costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars and insisting that potential buyers give up all purchase protection seems unreasonable to me. Raise your prices if necessary and allow your customers to pay via Goods and Services. Note: Once again, scamming comes into play here; I believe some reborn artists in particular insist on Friends and Family because Goods and Services offers less protection for the seller. There are plenty of unscrupulous buyers who perpetuate fraud by making false claims to PayPal about unreceived, damaged, or not-as-described dolls; Goods and Services allows them to make these false claims where Friends and Family would not. But I don’t think insisting on Friends and Family is the correct solution to this problem. I will probably write another post about discernment and good judgment in online doll communities that will address this issue.
6. Don’t blame the buyer or their country of residence if things go wrong. Things are unlikely to go wrong when you ship internationally, but if they do, keep your cool. Maybe the buyer is to blame, but it’s slightly more likely that you’re to blame and likeliest of all that no one is to blame. Be patient, call the postal service if necessary, and work out a solution that’s fair to both parties. It’s fine to state that you cannot be responsible for refunding a buyer’s money if a package gets damaged or goes missing! I lean towards this policy because I’m just a collector who occasionally sells stuff I don’t want, not a store with a business account and business insurance. But I will always make the effort to track down missing packages and communicate with the postal service; it’s only polite. Remember that one mishap does not validate or justify prejudice against a particular nationality or international shipping generally. And I hope this is an unnecessary reminder, but always be polite to postal service workers. It’s not their fault either and they have a stressful job that doesn’t need to be made any more stressful.

That’s all I’ve got for now. I hope it’s helpful! Please let me know if you have any questions about international shipping or want to address something I didn’t cover. And if you see someone in the doll community being stubborn or getting upset about international shipping, say something or direct them to this post! Let’s work together to make sure everyone around the world can participate fairly in the doll hobby.