I have been running an ecommerce web site here in Thailand for some time now, it’s got easier over the years for two main reasons.

• The Postal Service has got more reliable.
• It’s easy to accept credit cards and get paid to my Thailand Bank.

For years I would only ever use International Registered Airmail, but last year the cost of International Registration doubled and that has had a serious impact on my postage costs. I need to keep my postage costs low because my customers have the option of ordering from a UK seller which would mean lower postage, so I subsidise the postage a little based on my making a decent profit from the goods that I sell.

A couple of months ago I got about 8 packages returned, all but one had a sticker from the UK post office to say that delivery had been attempted and due to nobody being home a card had been left, and nobody had collected the parcel from the sorting office. The other one said “no such address” which is strange as it was verified by the credit card company.

It’s fair to say that a great deal of my time is spent dealing with cutomers who are waiting for their parcel to arrive, and if it gets to 14 days after posting I always suggest that they check the sorting office. But recently I have started sending items by plain Airmail with no registration, the result is that items are getting there faster, and the level of complaints of non delivery have gone down to virtually nothing.

I know that if a customer makes a chargeback based on non delivery then I would not have a leg to stand on, but I guess that’s unlikely given the kind of product I sell online. And I’m saving lots of money on postage too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 1:41 am and is filed under Thailand, eCommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.