A customer in Germany wrote to us this month and asked whether we could send a pair of floor stands across the Atlantic. Our checkout said no. It only quotes United States addresses, so the honest answer was that we would work it out by hand and write back.
We have said that before, and usually it ended there. This time we went and got the real numbers — six countries, three carton sizes, every figure read off a carrier's own screen — and put them on the site. Here is what they turned out to be, and where the first parcel got to.
Why our checkout will not ship overseas
Most NoBox orders are picked, packed and carried by Amazon's fulfilment network. That is how three people get you a parcel as quickly as a much larger company can, and it is why standard shipping inside the US is free. It also stops at the border.
What we can send abroad is whatever is physically on our own shelf in Atlanta, and that is the refurbished range. So international shipping is not really a policy here. It is a question of which shelf the thing is sitting on.
Seven prices for the same box
One carton, one address in Germany, all quoted within the same minute: $78.45 at the cheap end, $178.68 at the top. The cheap one is a tracked postal service that takes ten to seventeen business days. The expensive one lands in three to five.
They picked the cheap one, which is what we would have picked.
Canada is the odd one out at $39.39, and the reason is not that it is close. It goes by road. Nothing crosses an ocean, nothing clears an air gateway, and that is worth about forty dollars.
We take $15 off every one of those figures before we quote it, because the price of the stand already includes what delivery costs us inside the US, and you are not going to use that.
One stand or two, the same price
Here is the part we did not expect. A carrier prices a big light box on its size rather than its weight. Our floor-stand carton is 30 by 15 by 6.5 inches, which bills as about 21 pounds no matter what is inside it. One stand weighs 7.5 pounds. A pair weighs 14.9. The freight came back identical to the cent.
So a pair costs no more to send abroad than a single does. That is a strange thing to learn about your own product at this stage, and it is the best argument we have for buying two.
What you pay at your own door
We cannot prepay your customs bill, and we would rather tell you the number now than let you meet it on the doorstep. Into the European Union a stand attracts import VAT — 19% in Germany — charged on the goods and the freight together, and the carrier adds a handling fee for paying it on your behalf — somewhere between €7.50 and €15, depending on which carrier clears it.
What actually happens, step by step
None of this is automatic, and you should know that before you write. There is no overseas checkout to click through. We build the order by hand, one at a time — the piece you want, the right carton, the country, the freight — and send it to you as an invoice. Here is the whole of it, so there are no surprises in the middle.
- You write to us and say which piece you want, one or a pair, and the full delivery address including the postcode. The address is not us being nosy — the freight cannot be priced without it.
- We quote you the same day. The real carrier price for your carton and your country, less the $15 credit, with $15 as the minimum — and both speeds, so the choice is yours rather than ours.
- You pick a service. Economy is ten to seventeen business days. Faster is a few.
- We build the order by hand and send you a PayPal invoice, in US dollars. Dollars on purpose: your own bank converts at its rate instead of PayPal's, which is a few dollars in your pocket.
- You pay the invoice. PayPal's buyer protection applies from that moment.
- We pack it, buy the label and send you the tracking number. Nothing is bought until the money has landed, and nothing is packed by anyone but us.
- Your own customs authority bills you when it arrives — import tax and the carrier's handling fee, paid to them and never to us. The numbers are a few paragraphs up.
Steps one to three are usually a single day and one email each way. Everything after that is us and the carriers. And one thing to know before you start rather than after: an order sent abroad is final sale — the carton is built to survive one long journey, not two. The warranty is untouched.
Why you pay us outside the shop
This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth explaining rather than glossing over. Our shop runs on Shopify, and Shopify will not take a payment from a customer whose address is not in the United States. The checkout refuses the country on the delivery form, and that form comes before the payment step — so there is no card to enter and no button to press, whatever you try. It is a limitation of the system, not a decision we made about you.
So we opened a PayPal business account, and overseas orders are invoiced through that instead. It is less a workaround than the answer: a PayPal business invoice carries PayPal's own buyer protection, which is worth having when you are sending a few hundred dollars across an ocean to a workshop you have never heard of.
Still on its way
The first one left Atlanta on 19 September. USPS takes the opening leg and DHL takes it on from Kentucky. We expect Deutsche Post to carry it the last mile, on the symmetry of the post office taking the first — though that is our guess rather than something we have watched, and we will know shortly.
So this one is not finished, and we are not going to write it up as though it were. We quoted ten to seventeen business days, and until the parcel is in somebody's hands that is a carrier's promise rather than anything we have watched happen. We will update this post when the journey completes — whether it arrived, how long it actually took against the window we quoted, and what was actually charged at the door. Those are the numbers we do not have yet, and they are the ones worth waiting for.
The rates are all published here, country by country, for stands and for mounts. If yours is not on the list, send us the address and we will price it the same day.
Let's play.
