At MusicianWear.com, and MusicianWear-EBAY, we do something that most companies do not do;  sell internationally.  The reason most companies do not engage in international sales is risk.   Most credit card fraud originates outside the USA.  The system of security checks & balances doesn't work the same for non-USA customers.   On Ebay, even though all of our items are "Buy it Now" or "pay before we ship" there are still greater risks than for domestic sales.

We understand most of the risks and take steps to avoid them.  However, we also try to balance our strategy with 2 other factors;  1)  there is a great demand by musicians & music lovers in other countries for the logowear items we sell, and whose companies reside in the USA, and 2) common sense marketing; sell to the world, not just any one country.

On EBAY, we have sold product all over the world.  Within the last year, about 30% of our sales are to customers outside the USA.  These customers have come to us from the UK, Australia, Russia, Germany, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Japan, Singapore, S. Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Taiwan, Oman, Israel, South Africa, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Puerto Rico, New Zealand, Greece, Turkey, India and many, many more.

We do refuse to sell to some countries, such as (duh) Iraq, Iran, N. Korea, Cuba and others, such as Indonesia, who have a long and clear track record of fraudulent, online activity.  We also take certain other precautions, such as "scoring" a customer's feedbacks and other methods we've learned over our many years of selling outside the USA.

Our primary protection, however, is quite simple;  insurance.  As ALL international sales are paid for by PayPal, we do have the money in hand, before we ship.  However, that does not insure a safe transaction.  To avoid any problems, we developed a policy that works for us.  If your international order is being shipped to a CONFIRMED, PayPal address, we will not necessarily require postal insurance except in certain circumstances.   However, if your PayPal address is UNCONFIRMED, we then reserve the right to require the purchase of Postal Insurance.  This way, we can make use of PayPal's address confirmation system and apply that to our own procedures.

Many times, however, the PayPal address confirmation system is not in effect in some countries, thus showing as UNCONFIRMED by default.  So, to protect ourselves and the customer from any loss or theft, we then require insurance.  Most of the time, we do this in a way that does offer the customer (usually) faster delivery along with their additional expense.  When the customer pays the higher rate for the insurance, they also normally get an upgrade to PRIORITY INTERNATIONAL MAIL.   The Post Office tells us that PMI packages will always get processed faster than regular or 1st Class shipments.  So, hopefully, the extra expense is offset a little by knowing that you'll be getting it faster, anywhere in the world.  

We want to musicians & music lovers worldwide to have access to these hard-t0-find items in our store.  As a business, we want to sell to everyone.  But selling internationally does mean more risk.  It also means more paperwork and many times, more emails often requesting shipping information.  We will continue to sell internationally & to make every effort to do so in a manner affordable to our customers.  And, any insurance purchased by a customer is from the Post Office, so we don't make any money from a customer's purchase of any insurance.

We're hopeful of doing more business with the world, but we'd also like to do so safely, for both us and the customer.  Please feel free to contact us if you ever have any questions about international sales.

We at MusicianWear.com operate two stores;  our "regular" online store and, our very successful EBAY store.  We view each as benefitting from the other and we reach more interested customers this way.  The strategy is right, but sometimes, there is a down side; inventory management. 

What makes our situation, at times, difficult are two primary factors:  most of our t-shirt products are printed by the companies whose name appears on them, and also, all of our products are "Store Inventory" rather than "auctions". 

Most of the companies we deal with are musical instrument companies that excel at making musical instruments or related products.  However, many times, they will run out or stop making an item that we have been stocking in our stores.  Having worked for several guitar companies, we know this can happen and we always remind ourselves that t-shirts & promotional items are NOT their primary business.  But occassionally, this can affect our inventory management, causing a delay in replenishing our stock or even the rare instance whereby we have to contact a customer to tell them we can no longer get the items we, by now, expected to have.

Our other, "regular" online store, also sells the same items as those on our EBAY store.  But there is only one inventory and sales for both come from the same inventory.  In rare instances, this can cause a conflict.  Recently, we had a customer purchase 4 t-shirts in the same size of a model that had only 4 remaining, from our regular store.  Before we could adjust the EBAY store's inventory to show no size LARGE remaining, sure enough, we received an EBAY order for the same shirt in size Large.  

Within 3 hours of this customer's placement of the order, we contacted him and explained the situation.  We pointed out our "Product Inventory" link on each store page, & how it explains this possibility.  We also offered free shipping on another item/size & other ways to try to make this customer happy.   This customer, rather than respond in any way, went directly to the Negative Feedback play.   Of course, we felt this was unfair to us and we also did not understand how one person, with one order, was able to leave us TWO negative feedbacks.  But alas, EBAY policy basically allows customers to say whatever they want.  We felt we did a good job of watching the inventory levels, warning customers, and making quick contact to work things out.  But we also learned another lesson;  some customers like to wield the negative feedback like a sword, seemingly anxious to leave a negative comment rather than make any attempt to work with us.

Similarly, we had a customer purchase one shirt from us.  The paperwork on his order became illegible so we sent, in all, FOUR emails asking him if he got his order, if it was correct and if he was happy with it.  He never responded to any of our contact efforts.  As we were deciding what to do, this customer went directly to the Negative Feedback card, again with no response to our emails or any attempt whatsoever to work things out.  

We offer a rather unique product line.  We are a fully AUTHORIZED dealer, which make us rather unique.  The logowear we sell from guitar, drum, amp & related companies is normally, hard-to-find.  It's also hard-to-get, even for us sometimes and it is often hard-to-manage regarding inventory levels.   Our expectation was that reasonable people can always resolve any problems and that customers would understand the difference between "auctions" and "store inventory".

We continue to monitor inventory levels and do all that we can to make sure a customer encounters no problems or delays in the processing of any order placed with us.  But the question has been raised, internally, if we are better off reducing the items available in our EBAY store, to avoid these types of "shoot first" customers.   It was suggested to us in another forum, that some of these "unreasonable" customers are actually competitors in disguise who place an order with the idea of creating negative feedback situations;  the hope is to create the image of us as uncaring or unprofessional.

While we cannot guarantee that we will never sell out of an item again, we CAN guarantee to be professional in how we handle any such problems that arise.  We're hopeful that most of our customers will understand the economics of inventory management.  For the 99%, or hundreds, of "normal" customers we've served, we value them now, more than ever.