How to Build a Smarter International Shipping Strategy

Most merchants assume they have a solid handle on their growth. But if you’re only looking at domestic performance, you’re missing a significant piece of the picture. International consumers represent a real—and often untapped—opportunity. They tend to spend more and return less than their domestic counterparts. The question is: do you have the right strategy in place to reach them?

In a recent webinar, ShipStation’s Rob Zaleski sat down with James Marley, VP of Cross-Border at Swap Commerce, to unpack what a modern international shipping strategy actually looks like. Below are the key takeaways every merchant should have on their radar.

Start by measuring your real international opportunity

Before you can build a better international shipping strategy, you need to understand where you currently stand—and that means going beyond a single conversion rate metric.

Marley recommended mapping domestic performance across the full funnel: bounce rate, add-to-basket rate, basket-to-order rate, order-to-checkout rate, and lifetime value. Then do the same for each international market. The gap between the two tells you exactly where the friction is.

In one example, Marley found that a brand’s China traffic was bouncing because its website required users to complete a CAPTCHA—select fire hydrants, school buses, etc.—to get past the entry screen. A top-of-funnel fix, not a checkout optimization. In another case, a UK brand was unknowingly confusing US shoppers by displaying UK shoe sizes without conversion. Small changes, big impact.

The lesson: problems at the top of the funnel carry more weight than anything you tweak at the bottom.

Understand what the end of de minimis actually means for you

If you’ve been selling internationally without thinking much about duties and taxes, the rules have changed. The US has eliminated its de minimis threshold, which previously allowed low-value shipments to enter without duties. Now, all inbound shipments require duties and taxes—regardless of value.

In practical terms, that shift means what once required a single line of customs data now requires more than 30. Merchants are now responsible for providing product composition, country of origin, gender classification, and a Manufacturer Identification (MID) code—all to generate an accurate HTS code for each shipment.

“You can’t just ship it and hope that it will get there,” Marley said. “That’s what 95% of ecommerce merchants have done in the past.”

This isn’t just a US issue. The EU has introduced Import One Stop Shop. Norway added VAT on ecommerce. New compliance requirements are compounding globally. An effective international shipping strategy today means knowing exactly what data your shipments need—before they leave the warehouse.

Stop optimizing for the cheapest rate

Rate cards are complicated by design. Fuel surcharges, residential surcharges, volumetric weight versus actual weight—the list of variables is long enough that chasing the lowest per-pound rate often produces the highest total cost.

The smarter move is matching your carrier to your product profile. High average order value? An express carrier with a closed network, carrier-owned aircraft, and 92%+ on-time delivery is worth the premium—and protects your brand when something goes wrong. Selling lower-margin, lightweight goods? A postal network may be more appropriate, but go in knowing that on-time delivery rates may be closer to 70–80%, and loss rates will be higher.

Getting this right is part of any serious international shipping strategy. Cutting corners on carrier selection doesn’t save money—it transfers the cost to returns, refunds, and customer support.

Remove uncertainty with guaranteed prepaid duties and taxes

Even merchants who get the carrier selection right can get tripped up by unpredictable duties and tax invoices. Marley walked through two common scenarios:

Shipping DDU (Delivered Duty Unnpaid) means the consumer pays duties at the door—which today looks indistinguishable from a scam text message. Most consumers won’t pay it. The shipment gets returned. The merchant absorbs the cost of duties, taxes, and reimportation.

Shipping DDP (Delivered Duty Paid) solves the consumer experience problem but creates a new one for the merchant: you’ve committed to covering the duties, but you don’t know exactly what they’ll be until the invoice arrives weeks later.

ShipStation’s Guaranteed Prepaid Duties and Taxes feature addresses both problems. At checkout, the consumer sees the full landed cost—including duties and taxes—so there are no surprises at delivery. On the merchant side, ShipStation collects the correct amount, ensures the right HTS codes are applied to the landed cost calculation, and passes along an invoice that matches what was collected. The uncertainty is gone from both ends of the transaction.

Build for resilience, not just reach

A well-designed international shipping strategy isn’t just about opening new markets—it’s about reducing your dependence on any single one. Merchants with active international operations are better positioned to weather domestic slowdowns, because their revenue isn’t concentrated in one geography.

Marley’s closing advice was characteristically direct: clean up your product data, pick the right carrier for what you’re selling, do in-market research to understand who you’re actually competing with internationally, and use tools like guaranteed prepaid duties and taxes to remove the guesswork.

“Global ecommerce is not about chasing lower shipping rates all the time,” he said. “It’s about building a resilient, compliant, predictable cross-border operation that serves you and your consumers.”

ShipStation gives merchants the tools to do exactly that. Start a free trial to see how.

This post is based on a ShipStation webinar series featuring James Marley, VP of Cross-Border at Swap Commerce.

Candace Barnette

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