Shipping perspective

I need some guidance -

 

For more than 10 years I have only been sending to a small amount of countries which I feel have proved to have generally reliable postal systems.

I wasn't even sending to Canada until just recently when a buyer begged me to make an exception which I did, and they are thrilled with their items and will order more. The items were sent tracked so I felt ok with doing it.

 

So, I'm considering opening up worldwide shipping, but I'm stressing about sending to certain countries which are notorious for items getting "lost".

Having said all that, if someone orders 2 of my cushion covers, the combined postage will cover tracked shipping, but if they only order 1 item it's not worth the cost to track and this is where I fear I will make losses.

 

So, I guess I just need feedback whether opening up worldwide shipping is worth it these days.

I'm trying to grow my shop so I know that having a bigger customer base will be hugely beneficial, but I'm undecided.

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Shipping perspective


@*tippy*toes* wrote:

 

I don't know how people get millions of followers.


Interaction, unless they're famous for some other reason - Instagram, while it's basically an image sharing website, is still a social media site, so to get people to engage with a page, you need to engage with the community, follow other pages with related content, etc

 

I've held off on creating my page as I wanted to change my business name and didn't want to set it up until that process was finished on all my venues, but I've been reading / watching a lot of content on how to use it effectively. Apparently (on average) engagement for businesses on Instragram is around 58 times more than engagement on Facebook, which is pretty impressive if true, so it has the potential to be a really powerful tool for businesses that can cultivate a following. 

 

Top tips that I've gleaned, aside from interacting with the community, along with the hashtags, is to be consistent, be recognisable (as in, the content you upload is recognisable as belonging to your brand), and don't just rely on visuals, but tell a story along with the image - for home decor it would be all about aesthetics, maybe trying to evoke a particular mood. You could search out popular tags and see if any of them match designs, eg if elephants are being talked about a lot (and not for a bad reason, like poaching), and you have some covers with elephants on them, it'd be a good time to upload an image of those.  

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Shipping perspective

If you want some ideas on which countries to block, look at  Global Shipping and the countries they exclude. Make sure to actually exclude the countries, not just have "posts to Australia" as this doesn't stop them from buying. My concern would be more about having to pay fees on the shipping costs, many have said this makes it untenable.

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Shipping perspective

My answer is probably not relevant to you becauseI sell second hand designer label clothering maily NZ & used to sell to to North America, Europe & NZ but when ebay brought in final value fees on postage I quickly realised it's just not financially viable for me.

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