Accepting orders from international consumers requires a number of unique capabilities on the back end as well as the front end in order to deliver a positive shopping experience. The cost of developing all of those capabilities in-house may not be worth the benefit given the uncertainty of the upside.
Canada Post Borderfree product classification, order management and fulfillment modules allow you to get your international business up and running quickly and efficiently:
Product Classification
An integral component of international commerce is the ability to classify products for presentation to customers during the checkout as well as customs authorities at time of import.
Merchants upload their product catalog to Borderfree during the initial integration, and send updates whenever changes are made to their catalogs. Using Harmonized System (HS Classification) standards agreed to by most of the world's customs authorities, Borderfree's product classification module auto-classifies as many items as it can, and leaves the remainder for manual classification. Once this process is complete, the merchant's catalog is ready for international customers to purchase from. The HS classification is used by customs agencies to determine tariffs, taxes and other government requirements.
Another component of the product classification engine is the restriction of commodities per geography. Some geographies have a lax import legislation and allow most types of items to cross into their borders while other countries have much stricter import laws. These items are found and restricted in the Borderfree which is reflected during customer checkouts where any restricted items are flagged and must be removed from their basket.
Products are also rated for volumetric size and weight in this process. These estimations are inputted into the shipping rate calculators during the checkout process which allows Borderfree to give very competitive international shipping rates.
Price Quoting
The Price Quoting module is responsible for providing guaranteed pricing on all cost components involved in getting an order from merchant, across borders, directly to the customer's door. Our control of the underlying logistics chain provides you with the capability to present cost certainty to buyers in their local currency. Improve conversion by speaking to your customers in their terms throughout the shopping and buying phases of the order life-cycle. The Price Quoting module is tightly coupled with our Product Classification module. Classifications of a particular product or set of products drive the quoting services.
Borderfree offers various integration options tailored to the level of international customer experience you want to offer. Our web services have full API support for website integration, or you can choose a hosted solution to reduce integration efforts and time-to-market. Based on the integration method you select, you will be able to guarantee product page pricing, basket pricing, and fully landed cost quotes as final amounts in the customer's domestic currency instead of U.S. dollars.
You can alternatively choose to override price calculations with a fixed pricing schedule that has duties and exchange rates incorporated into the final prices to be presented.
Order Capture
Our system accepts the international order and in turn provides the merchant domestic data elements, such as domestic shipping and billing profile, to facilitate a "normal" domestic transaction from the merchants back office point of view. All orders are shipped to a domestic address and Borderfree takes it from there.
Our fraud management service is integrated into international payment processing and credit services to review credit worthiness and fraud risk at run time such that orders can be accepted or rejected in real-time.
Our financial and treasury systems manage foreign exchange, credit card specifics and financial reconciliation for every order if the merchant chooses Canada Post Borderfree to manage customer billing.
Order Management
International commerce involves a customer in a foreign country, fulfillment partners both domestic and international and financial partners. The result is a complex cost base in a variety of currencies. In order to effectively service the international customer, one must aggregate the cost elements, ensure they are translated into the appropriate currency and attempt to do all of this without artificially inflating the costs due to rounding and conversion complexity.
A recurring theme throughout our solutions is the ability for merchants and to treat the Canada Post Borderfree system as their international database. Doing so helps minimize the complexity of implementations as well as the ongoing costs associated with dynamic international commerce. We have carefully designed our system interfaces to give your developers and database administrators the ability to use our service in a variety of ways.
Canada Post Borderfree helps manage all aspects of an international order. From merchant distribution center, across any borders, direct to the customer's door. The Order Management Module is integral to coordinating the data flow between partners along the parcel delivery path. Our system ensures data is collected at various junctures and then distributed to partners forward in the delivery chain prior to the parcel's arrival. This helps ensure a seamless flow of activities and efficient parcel processing which result in timely, predictable delivery windows.
Fulfillment
As parcels travel through our hubs, they are prepared for customs import and labeled for distribution with our last mile delivery agents. Different parcels have different handling needs as determined by the level of detail attainable in advance of the parcel arriving from the merchant.
The first step in the parcel preparation is to match it to an order in our system. There are a number of markings on the parcel that can be used for this purpose. Once matched, the system generates a parcel control label that contains a unique parcel number encoded into a bar code and affixed to the parcel. Subsequent handlers down the line using the Borderfree system can then simply scan the parcel and have the system react automatically.
Borderfree removes friction from the fulfillment chain by facilitating substantial data distribution in advance of the physical parcel to channel partners. Having this information in advance, allows our partners to pre-clear with customs authorities and other revenue agencies, assisting in the continual transport of your orders.
Depending on order volume, you may choose to ship packages to Borderfree's U.S. hubs for processing, or you can instead run Borderfree software in your distribution center to label packages for Canadian postal delivery, transmit data feeds to clear shipments through customs, and drive your truckloads across the border for direct insertion into the Canadian postal stream.
- Copyright 2009 Canada Post Borderfree
