Bill Myers

Back when I was living in New Zealand, one of the biggest frustrations was getting US companies to sell me products and ship them to New Zealand. In many cases, the companies would tell me, "We just don't ship overseas" . . . this included even easy to ship products like books, videos, and software.

Even today, many companies still don't make allowances to sell and ship products to customers living outside their country borders. Either they don't accept international orders, or they fail to include provisions in their order forms that would encourage international customers to order.

The failure to include the 800 million potential customers with credit cards who live outside the US can cost you a lot of potential business - and also send potential customers to competitors who do accept international orders.

Whether you live in the US, UK, Australia, or even New Zealand, you should try to make it easy for international customers to order from you.

Do this by including details about your international shipping prices on your order form, and a country field in the billing and shipping address. Also include phrases like 'international orders welcome', and 'we ship globally' in your product descriptions. And when possible, offer variations of your products that conform to various regional standards (for example, we ship region-free DVDs to our international customers).

Making your business 'international friendly' only takes a few minutes - but the payoff in increased orders and new customers can be quite significant.