Bill Myers - October 16, 2009

As some of you know, I lived in New Zealand for a few years.

And while it was a beautiful country, it was a very frustrating place to order products from.

See, many US companies, especially smaller ones offering info products and software, weren't set up to ship to international customers.

They would simply say, 'we only ship to US addresses'.

And in doing so, they would lose a lot of potential customers - since far more people live outside the US than within it.

When I moved back to the US, I was determined to make it easy for international customers to do business with my company.

One way we do that is to offer free international shipping on all items we sell.

And we make sure international customers know about this by including a drop down message on our product pages telling them about free shipping to anywhere in the world.

Providing free worldwide shipping does cut into our profit margins, but it also opens up our business to millions of new potential customers.

The result?

International customers now account for more than 40% of our total sales.

The lesson to be learned from this . . . it pays to welcome international orders, especially when your competitors do not.