Tag: Europe

Delivery and logistics company DHL International GmbH and U.K.-based Borderlinx, a company that helps businesses ship goods from a number of suppliers, have partnered to assist U.S. e-retailers selling internationally. The deal aims to make it easy for U.S. e-retailers to ship abroad, and for foreign consumers to know how much they will pay for shipping.

Under the agreement, U.S. online retailers can integrate directly with Borderlinx to make their products available to the international marketplace. The integration provides web merchants with such services as order fulfillment and warehousing and shipping and delivery services out of DHL’s primary ground hub in Wilmington, OH, to any of the 225 countries and territories to which DHL ships. The hub location allows easy access to international flights, as well as late cut-off times for orders, according to DHL.

The five-year deal is aimed squarely at what Borderlinx founder Neill O’Sullivan says is huge demand among international consumers to shop U.S. e-commerce sites. Only a small percentage of the top 500 U.S. Internet retailers ship internationally, and O’Sullivan says the deal removes two key barriers preventing U.S. e-retailers from doing so—the inability of U.S. online retailers to easily sell and ship to foreign consumers, and the reluctance of an international shopper to complete a purchase without knowing the shipping fee.

When a U.S. merchant ties into the U.S. DHL/Borderlinx platform, consumers from abroad will see an international shipping button during the checkout process. A click of that button passes the transaction to Borderlinx, which calculates the total cost of getting the order from the merchant to the international customer, including the product price, the shipping costs and a Borderlinx service charge of about 10% of the product price.