Zonos

Zonos optimizes your site for international sales by offering built-in duty and tax calculations, compliance and localization to improve your customer's buying experience. What the heck does that mean? If you are an American based business and you have customers buying from you that live in other countries, there are additional fees placed on their order called duties and taxes. Either you have to pay them, or the customer does. Oftentimes retailers and customers are unaware of what the additional fees will be until carriers attempt to deliver the package and require payment of those fees to do so.

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Zonos solves this problem by making these fees completely transparent to you and your customer as they are shopping.

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Zonos optimizes your site for international sales by offering built-in duty and tax calculations, compliance and localization to improve your customer's buying experience. What the heck does that mean? If you are an American based business and you have customers buying from you that live in other countries, there are additional fees placed on their order called duties and taxes. Either you have to pay them, or the customer does. Oftentimes retailers and customers are unaware of what the additional fees will be until carriers attempt to deliver the package and require payment of those fees to do so.

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Zonos solves this problem by making these fees completely transparent to you and your customer as they are shopping.

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Zonos does not handle the shipping or handling of your package. They strictly offer software that can be added to your site, allowing you to take control of your international shipping, duties, and taxes, and improve your customers experience.

Most other tools that are similar to Zonos are considered "Consolidators." Consolidators combine packages from many different shippers into one load that is then shipped as a unit to the destinations' local Post Office. This saves shippers money, and is perhaps ideal for very high volume international shippers, but ultimately loses merchants control over their packages, and is not the main focus point of an app like Zonos.

Typically this tool would be setup and ran by your head of eCommerce, head of operations or logistics, or whoever is in charge of shipping the product out. It can also be run by a head of marketing or head of customer service, because those departments are positively impacted by the tool.

The landed cost app is easy to setup and can be done within an hour.

The hosted checkout (Zonos Hello) tool typically takes about a week to setup, but can go faster depending on how quickly their team can get the information needed. They offer merchants all the tools necessary to do the setup themselves, as well as offering to have Zonos do the integration for them for a $150 fee (our recommendation).

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Managing this tool is fairly easy and doesn't require much follow up. It is pretty set and forget, just depending on how many changes/updated you make to your international sales. Zonos offers a support team that can be reached at any time for changes or help.

Zonos is the perfect solution for merchants that are looking to expand their international customers and want to be more hands on with their customers' experience. Understanding what it costs to ship to those abroad helps you to better cater to that audience, leading to more appropriate offers for the customer and better margin management for you.

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Now, you shouldn't be thinking about using Zonos if you have very few international orders, if you aren't interested in expanding that customer base, or if you aren't really getting many customer service issues related to duties/taxes/shipping.