Which countries to avoid selling/delivering to?

[HobbyMounts]

We're just in the middle of setting up an online payment gateway and have to choose which countries we want to block either payment and/or delivery to. Or not.

We sell a range of action cameras/accessories, so are there any countries we should seriously think about blocking?

I've googled a list and it's quite extensive, but just wanted a few real world experiences if anyone has any?

 

[TotallySport]

italy, and nigeria.

Italy the postal service is so rubbish unless your using a european courier you get more lost than anywhere in the world.

nigeria for obvious reasons.

 

[SillyJokes]

Your payment provider may have a list. There are masses of places you probably shouldn't bother sending goods to, especially valuable resellable goods like yours.

 

[TotallySport]

Your payment provider may have a list. There are masses of places you probably shouldn't bother sending goods to, especially valuable resellable goods like yours.

expet italy, we had many more problems in the UK, than we had overseas.

 

[sb65]

We don't sell quite such 'stealable' items, but have adopted a policy of sending items by courier or signed for post to countries which might be viewed as dodgy.

For what it's worth, we'll send by normal post to the Western European countries, Australia, NZ, US and Canada. Anything in eastern Europe goes signed for/courier, and we've had no problems to date. Quite a few orders have gone signed to eastern Europe and one to Kazakhstan.

We've also set up Opencart so that if a customer tries to place an order for a country that's not on our list it allows the customer to enter their order as a 'Request Delivery Cost' without paying - so we can take a judgement on whether it's OK, but without discouraging the customer. We then bill the customer offline ocne the cost's been agreed. This is a handcrafted mod but I've a feeling there's an extension that does something similar.

Opencart supports all this via GeoZones.

We've had no problems with Italy, touch wood.... I'm told that Belarus is particularly bad for losing post of all kinds.

 

[HobbyMounts]

This is the list I've added to blocked payments via SagePay.

Although I have still left PayPal payments available, not sure whether that is more secure as a seller as I will ship signed for/tracked?

I'm assuming seller protection would be available via PayPal if they meet the criteria.

Afghanistan
Albania
Algeria
Angola
Armenia
Azerbaija
Belarus
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Bulgari
Burundi
Cambodia
CongoBrazzaville
Croatia
Cuba
Ecuador
Egypt
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Georgia
Guatemala
Israel
Kazakhstan
Kirghistan
Laos
Liberia
Libya
Macedonia
Malaysia
Moldova
Mongolia
Myanmar(Burma)
Nigeria
NorthKorea
Pakistan
Philippines
RepublicofCentralAfrica
Romania
Russianfederation
Rwanda
SierraLeone
Sudan
Surinam
Tajikistan
Turkmenistan
Ukraine
Uzbekistan/ouzbekistan
Yemen
Yugoslavia
Zaire

 

[sb65]

I'm assuming you're interested in comments on that list...from a cursory glance, you'll send to Haiti, Somalia and Lebanon? And Montenegro but not Macedonia?

 

[TotallySport]

This is the list I've added to blocked payments via SagePay.

Although I have still left PayPal payments available, not sure whether that is more secure as a seller as I will ship signed for/tracked?

I'm assuming seller protection would be available via PayPal if they meet the criteria.

Personally I would send them everywhere until I had enough issues to make it not worth the time and money.

Expect nigeria.

 

[TotallySport]

I should also had, that I would have though the places your blocking I would suggest they all have a valid market for your product.

I mean why egypt?

 

[antropy]

Expect nigeria.

It's interesting that everyone is so anti-Nigeria. We've had some great clients from there with no payment issues at all.

 

[HobbyMounts]

I guess it depends on the product/service maybe?

 

[TotallySport]

It's interesting that everyone is so anti-Nigeria. We've had some great clients from there with no payment issues at all.

The purchases we got from nigeria, always paid by paypal and always did a charge back within 3 days, it might have been coinsidence, but we did get them a chance first.

 

[antropy]

I agree, I think it does depend on the service offered and we do always ask for a 50% deposit which tends to make sure that only the serious ones go ahead.

I guess if I had had 3 charge backs, I probably wouldn't want to supply there again either!

 

[MokaBox]

Interesting thread, especially the comments about Nigeria. I was speaking last week to a guy who works in a luxury watch shop in Mayfair - they sell watches with 6 and 7 figure price tags.

A large percentage of their clients now come from Nigeria. Some may have questionable sources of income, some not - but it's a significant market that can no longer be ignored.

In my yacht brokerage business I made a personal choice not to pursue enquiries from Nigeria due to the onerous KYC requirements that are now in force, but that may not be a wise choice for everybody.

 

[a1anm]

We sell 'theft attractive' products and don't explicitly ban any countries. We get quite a few sales to Italy and have never had a problem. We've also had legitimate sales to Nigeria.

Instead we just pay particular attention to orders from certain countries when doing our fraud checks.

We get just as many fraud attempts from the UK and US as anywhere else.

If you are worried about fraud coming from certain countries check the orders carefully. If you are worried about the postal service then insure the package.

I wouldn't blindly ban countries without giving them a chance first.

 

[TPH1]

Italy, Singapore & Spain have been the worse for me. I really need to get round to blocking those countries.

 

[deniser]

Even though they top the fraud lists, we have a large customer base in Romania and Bulgaria and have never had a problem sending there. We obviously scrutinise the orders carefully but there has never been cause for alarm.

We also send regularly to Croatia, Malaysia, Singapore, Israel and Russia. We have had fraudulent orders from Malaysia but they were obvious so we cancelled them.

We send all overseas orders international signed for. This makes a huge difference to the delivery success and also speeds up the delivery.

I agree that Italy is a big headache because of both fraud and the postal system. USA is also a problem for the sheer number of utterly odd people that we have to deal with.

The biggest problem for fraud though is the UK, often with German or American cards.

 

[bartonz20let]

Russia's postal service is 'interesting'

 

[HobbyMounts]

You say you check the orders, what manual fraud checks do you carry out?

If you'd rather PM that's fine as I realise this is a sensitive area.

 

[Rough Outline]

I've recently started offering international postage and I've had a handful of customers from Spain and Italy, zero problems from them.

I've had people from the UK claim that items have "gone missing" but I've never had any issues with postage.

 

[beasty]

Why block anywhere?

Use a global carrier and insure it as required

 

[HobbyMounts]

The postal insurance is fine, it's the chargebacks which are the ones to watch.

I've just had an order for £400 worth of camera and accessories to an unconfirmed address in italy. Shipping tracked isn't a problem but if it turns out to be an unauthorised payment, I'll lose the product and the cash!

 

[Riskified]

How many orders do you expect to get from foreign countries?
If it's more than a handful then you could lose a lot from blocking specific countries- based on my experience, there are almost no '100% fraud' countries.

As for manual reviewing orders, first thing to do is to make sure you don't have any geo mismatches, mainly between the credit card, billing, shipping and IP countries.

Feel free to PM me if you want more details on manually reviewing risky orders.

 

[Alittlenightmusic]

In 14 years of online trading only banned one country "Israel".delayed deliveries even with ISF and impatient customers.Life is too short to spend your time chasing every buck come what may.Never had a problem with Italy though but never sent by an untracked service.

 

[SillyJokes]

Our list is quite long, and many of the countries on there gave us problems when we started out and blithely sent orders to them, only to loose them, so my list isn't just plucked from the air.

Somewhere else to check is your liability insurance to make sure all the countries you plan to ship to are covered and paid for. They can make a big difference to the cost of said insurance. We had to stop shipping to the States and Canada due to the fact we struggled to get liability insurance. It added so much to the cost we had to stop shipping there as the number orders wouldn't have covered it.

Of course we do get more fraud from UK orders, but that is because our main market is UK and we naturally have more visitors to the site from the UK. So I don't think it's fair to say I had only 3 fraudulent orders from XXXXland but 12 from the UK therefore UK is less honest than XXXXland.

 

[HobbyMounts]

Seems the postal service/workers of Italy are a nightmare. Just had a frank message from a brit asking where his order was and I asked what the postal service was like it Italy and in his own words, 50% crap system, 50% thieving postal workers.

I think that says it all. Even so, if his item doesn't arrive, it's my loss.

Only small value items, but this week I've had 4 orders ship to Italy, Spain, Brazil and Russia which have gone walkies.

I'm about to pull low-cost untracked shipping to international addresses.