Delcampe Becoming Less of an International Site

Hi
Two recent developments lead me to that conclusion.

First I was recently requested to chose a single currency for all my listings. This might not be an issue for most sellers but I happen to be located in Canada and to sell stamps and postcards from all over the world with emphasis on France and Canada. Since a large majority of my buyers are in France and neighbouring countries I chose the Euros as my single currency. Now I have to invoice all my buyers in Euros, including Canadian buyers buying Canadian material, US buyers buying US material and so on. Now there is the inconvenience of this for everyone and the cost, since the implied forced currency conversions cost over 3% each way.

Second is the awful new Shipping Fees template. This was designed on the basis of the Belgian Post system, all very well for a Belgium based seller but utterly useless for everybody else. No two postal administration have the same system for charging their fees, nor for dividing the world, and in some cases, their own country, into fare zones.

For example, Canada has three zones for letters: domestic, USA and rest of the world. Since we have 7 weight steps, this makes for 21 different rates to which I can add registration fees if needed, so 42 different fees in all. But that only covers items of a certain size and weight to 500g.

How about Australia with about 7 foreign zones for letters? Or Italy where the closer African countries have the same rate as Europe? Or France where the DOM-TOM (Polynesia, Martinique, Réunion and more) have different rates? Every country will have these peculiarities.

For packages which is anything over 500g or larger than what is allowed as a letter, Canada has 6 domestic zones, 6 zones to the Continental USA and umpteen zones to the rest of the world, mostly varying from country to country, with 2 to 6 different services available depending on the destination and up to 10 dimensional weight steps.

Not complicated enough? The applicable rates within Canada and to the Continental USA depend on the zone you are shipping from as well as the zone you are shipping to.

Try and explain that to the programmer and repeat for each of 150 countries!

Delcampe has been my selling site for 17 years but there is a limit on how much work I'll need to put on each sale.

Good to get it off my chest. I just hope Delcampe will rethink its approach and revert to a worldwide view as it had in its early development

Personally, I miss a category called "standard shipping". Then I can decide for myself how I send regardless of the size of the envelope.

What is important is not the size of the envelope, but that the buyer receives his item!

I'm only a very small time buyer and seller and have ignored the template altogether as it was never going to suit me.

I have to agree.....the template is as close to useless as is possible for non-European sellers. I ignore it and enter the shipping fee on the invoice manually as I have done for unpteen years. No big deal as I do not get hundreds of orders daily on this site.

I must say that I have ever really regarded Delcampe as a truly international site - the emphasis has always been on Europe which is where most of the buyers/sellers on this site come from I guess For me here in Philippines, ALL my sales are international and only about one third are European

I think that Delcampe does its best in this pandemic era Other stamp sites, for instance, in USA, concentrate principally on USA and Canada.....

KEEP SAFE EVERYBODY

Emmbersplace, with your $4.95 shipping the templates would work great. I've set mine up with a more complex fee structure and after a couple of false starts are working well. I documented what I did in another thread Link (https) .

Delcampe is a european focussed site, no denying that, but the other site is an american focussed site (you've only got to see there issues with Syria, Iran etc listings to see that).

I think that overall Delcampe have been doing a good job of being an international site. The fact is that governments and post offices are making having a truely global ecommerce site more and more difficuly with increased Tax and Regulations each year.

On the currency issue as I've always listed and had fees in the same currency, as I expect the majority of users do. They may have culled the system as few users actually used it to make it easier to maintain in future.

On the postage issue I think this is a good attempt. the system works for simple fee structures (like mine)

It's clear that they havent fully investigated 150+ postal authorities and tried to mirror their rates etc fully, but think about how much that work would be. My guess is that they will take on board comments from countries with many Delcampers and adjust in due course.

They havent gone for the fully flexible approach either, probalby because trying to create a usable screeen that allows you to cross reference country (and individual states/districts within them), postal type, combining postage for multiple types (weight, item count etc) would be impossible.

If you have a complex fee structure it may be an idea to simplifiy it to work with the new system (or to use the existing one). As a customer there is nothing worse than having to get a calulator out to try and work out what the seller may try and charge, and you always have the impression that they are nickel and diming you. By trying to ensure that you never lose out financially on fees you may actually be losing sales. The 'trick' is to make sure that your structure encourages multiple purchases from the shop. Who really cares if your postage fee is $1 less than the actual postage on a $50 order. Equally losing a customer who orders a single $0.25 stamp because of the postage cost actually saves you time (and therfore money).

For heavier items this can be more complex but setting a template up for each of your main groups (stamps, covers, coins etc). Including a portion of the postage costs in the item cost works well to fit the item to an existing template rather than creating a new one.

Finally you dont need to use the system for all of your items,, use it for the ones it makes sence to. Exclude the 1.5kg folio by all means!

Apologies for the essay, I hope it is of use to someone!

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Yes, I know that the template works for my simple postage structure of 1 fixed registered postage charge for all packages to all destinations irrespective of the size or weight of envelope. But post rates are changing due to increased COVID-related costs and I may well have to abandon that simple method in the very near future

The USA focussed site that I was referring to does not have any issues with Syria, Iran, or any other US sanctioned country because of the slightly different way that they operate with pp etc. You must have been thinking of somewhere else maybe.....

No criticism of Delcampe was intended. Overall, it does a pretty good job. Each platform operates in its own best interests obviously and sellers will use the platforms that are best suited to their own intended sales market.