We strongly recommend that every one of our print studios (or artists who do self-fulfillment) provide international shipping and want to show you the easiest way to accomplish this.

Before reading this article, you may be using UPS or some other company for your domestic shipments. You may have investigated and even tried to start doing international shipments with these companies and at some point threw your hands in the air saying "there is no way our small little company can handle this extra workload".

It's true. International shipping used to be an extremely painful thing to do -- but we are here to tell you that today, things are not how they used to be. And if you are willing to hear us out and see this through, you will see that it is in fact much easier than you ever imagined to ship internationally. These days, we live in a global economy. Once you start offering to ship internationally, your business will appear bigger and better than other companies who have overlooked this.

Currently, if you are located in the United States, international shipping with Fedex is the way to go. Now - we are not saying that you should stop using whichever company you are using to ship domestically. For example, many of our customers use UPS to ship domestically. If you are in the same boat - you should keep using them.

The only point we are making here is that Fedex happens to be the one company that seems to have made international shipping easy. We also know that companies like UPS do not.

With Fedex, you can use their "Fedex Ship Manager" software to create international shipments that are literally just about as easy as sending a domestic shipment. All you have to do is get setup for international shipping in the first place, and once that is done, you just use the software to create new shipments to virtually any country as your orders come in. If you have never looked into this, or its been a while since the last time you investigated this, we recommend reaching out to Fedex again.

Here's a link to sign up for a FedEx Account.

Once you’ve signed up for a FedEx account you’ll receive access to the FedEx Ship Manager and from there you can use it to find out how much international shipments are going to cost (no different than you normally do). After that, you’ll effectively be able to take those prices and integrate them into your shipping costs on the Art Storefronts platform. Just like that, you're now shipping internationally.

Please Note: If you do decide to ship internationally, we recommend including a clear international return policy on your website.

Currently, Art Storefronts does not include the feature to turn shipping off for specific countries. Instead, we strongly suggest that for countries that you do not wish to ship to, you create a Shipping Zone for them and increase them to a price that would deter customers from ordering.

We also strongly suggest that you add a tooltip for the International Shipping Zone at checkout that states that you are not currently offering International Shipping, or to explain why your prices are so high.

To add information to the tooltip all you need to do is edit that shipping method within your site manager, and add the information into the description field.