BongoUS or similar intermediary shippers for int'l orders

[PatG]

I've become aware of companies who offer to act as an intermediary shipper for international buyers. So someone from the UK wants to buy from my USA store, they sign up with the intermediary, and the intermediary's address is used as the ship to location. Then the person in the UK has to work with the intermediary to pay freight and import tariffs / taxes. The ones that I have seen (i haven't used any at all) are BongoUS, ViaAddress, ShipItTo, BorderLinx, MyUS. These intermediaries allow you to integrate their different-than-normal shipping details into your checkout process - so where the consumer would usually enter their address details, they are routed outside of that process within your cart and fill out the intermediaries info, then are dumped back into your process for fulfillment.

One of these companies showed me a live partner of theirs, so I could see how it works. It wasn't a ShopSite cart, so I'm left wondering if others here have integrated anything like this into their ShopSite.

I asked at another webmaster board I frequent and haven't heard anything back there yet, good or bad.

Has anyone integrated any of these into ShopSite? Have others like them to add to my list above?

And of course I am curious about how returns would work, and whether fraud would still be a huge issue. So if you've got relevant ShopSite experience or know-how, I'd like to hear about it here.

I have also heard the term "transhipping" tossed around and was wondering if that's what these kinds of services are called.

[Jeff]

We don't export or usually accept orders from outside the U.S. Apparently many large American retailers have about the same policy. Our clearly stated policy doesn't stop people outside the U.S. from trying to buy from us. For the frequent "can you ship next day air to Lagos?" junk, we just hit delete. But the transhippers you mention are tougher.

We get some orders from Transshippers who are usually in port cities in California (LA. Oakland), New Jersey, and especially Miami. Their address usually contains a suite #. They are easy to spot as transshippers if you look up the address in G. Often the destination is a warehouse or moving company. Many of those orders are valid. Firms in Latin America often use them for legitimate purposes.

We also get rare overseas orders from those "Shop the USA" websites. I was just reading how one worked. The foreigner who wants to buy USA products pays a monthly fee which gets them an American phone number and a clean American address. In the last case, the ship-to was in Burlingame Ca, quite an affluent place. His purchases can be aggregated and shipped overseas in the case of our last order, Indonesia. That Shop-the-USA firm's site even had links to about 40 American retailers, all the majors. Perhaps they functioned as affiliate sellers and also made money that way.

I'm not aware of any software integration. What would that do? Perhaps disguise foreign IP of the shopper. Perhaps there's some translation function. The order we got from Indonesia had a phony email address, but otherwise may have been legit. We didn't ship it.

We use Lexiconn's Fraud Deterrent Module which shows the buyer's IP and can block selected countries if you wish. Our fraud loss is near-zero but we waste a lot of time sorting out the bad orders.

[PatG]

"I'm not aware of any software integration. What would that do? Perhaps disguise foreign IP of the shopper. Perhaps there's some translation function."

Knowing my own ShopSite, if they entered the shippers US address and used their own credit card, my SS cart would reject their order for address mismatch. So they leave the normal checkout stream to somehow (I didn't do any test purchases on the live site I saw) trigger their transhippers address (and I'm guessing, somehow translate funds from their card to a transhippers account) so that when they re-enter the usual SS checkout steps/stream, the ship address and cc details will be okay once submitted.

If you want to see the one example I have, the live site, send me a message here... wait... maybe a better idea would be for a moderator here to look at it, then explain it to us. I don't like talking about specific third parties (seems spammy) nor do I want to look like I'm trying to talk people into contacting me privately (also smells like canned meat).

So if a moderator here wants me to point them to the live example, I'd like to hear the resulting feedback. Otherwise, I'm inclined to not pursue this further here. Unless someone has already integrated a similar solution here, into ShopSite, and has either good or bad feedback for us to digest.