The Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games will soon be upon us, and Shipwire’s Vancouver Canada warehouse is seeing more activity as merchants ready for the games.   For information on Shipwire Canada and how you can use the warehouse see “Import to Canada” our Canada warehouse guide.

Canada Post is also working hard to ensure that they are ready for the games.  In a recent e-mail to Shipwire they assured us that they are doing everything possible to meet our daily business needs with minimal disruption during this once-in-a-lifetime experience for Vancouver Canada.  The bulk of this activity will be centered around their downtown Vancouver facilities; however, Canada Post is making efforts because of the general increase in parcel, mail and freight that is anticipated surrounding the games.

Shipwire recommends to our Canada Vancouver merchants that they expect increased mail volume during the period of the games (February 12-28th), as such there could be some delays with tracking numbers going live on inbound shipments.  Service levels in the warehouse should be normal.

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2010 has thus far been off to a rough start for the U.K. when it comes to weather. Heavy snow and wind have been causing mail delays. These rough weather days are particularly frustrating for Air shipment. Especially inbound freight and outbound parcel air deliveries. This will likely also cause some backups after the weather clears. Not only will shipments be backed up; but, the parcel delivery personal may also be getting delayed in daily tasks so tracking numbers may be slow to be issued and even ground shipments will face some delays as the mail systems back up. If you relay on a lot if inbound and outbound air shipments to sell into the UK, consider getting a local london warehouse.

To our UK warehouse team, please stay warm!  Here are some YouTube links to the weather link 1 and link 2.

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The U.K. VAT (Value Added Tax) changed on January 1, 2010 back to 17.5%.  The UK VAT rate had been set at 15% for 2009.  Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs have a page showing the change. This was a temporary reduction made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alastair Darling, after the global recession set in to help spur economic growth.  For more information check out Bloomberg. Many UK retailers used the last few weeks of 15% VAT rate to help add extra savings to promotions and discounts.

For more information on VAT and importing into the UK, see our guide -  import into the UK.

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Time to dust off the crystal ball and make some guesses as to what 2010 will bring for the global e-commerce market, SMB sellers and Shipwire.  In no particular order:

Cash Remains KING

At the beginning of the recession, The Economist wrote a bunch of articles about how those businesses that had cash in the bank wouldn’t just survive the recession, they would thrive.  Expansion cash is still hard to get your hands on – as evidenced by the Obama administration putting pressure on banks in Dec ‘09 to lend to SMB’s.  We have written many articles on this blog about gearing your business expenses to be  “success-based”, so that your business can expand and contract without fixed cost overruns.  An example will be helpful here.  If you lease a warehouse, you will need to spend money on a lease, security, build-out and  infrastructure.  These are fixed costs of your warehouse, you will have them regardless of whether you sell a product or not.  If you sell less than you expected, you probably leased too much space.  If your business expands, you may have leased too little space.  Either way, you took cash out of your pocket and committed it to infrastructure and not inventory, sales and marketing.  The Alternative is to use outsourced order fulfillment and pay only for the warehouse space that you use, when you use it.  So if in January-March you don’t have a lot of inventory, you are paying less than in Oct-December when you are well stocked and shipping a lot.   This is success-based e-commerce.  Cash is king and will be king in 2010 so make as many costs success-based variable costs.

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On January 4th, 2010 UPS and FedEx do their annual rate increase dance.  The market calls this dance the GRI or the General Rate Increase.  The Dance is usually performed as a “Two-Step” – Increase rates and surcharges and tell the market that it is being offset by a reduction in the fuel surcharge.  Happens every year, here is our blog on January 2009 UPS & FedEx GRI.

We’ll see if mid-year 2010 the third step of the dance is performed again?  The pulling back of the fuel surcharge reduction.  That’s right, that two-step dance, is actually a complex tap dance  that extends over a few months, and repeats year after year.  So obvious, it’s easily missed.

If you are a volume shipper; what do you do in the face of these increases?   First, understand the dance, then checkout out the increases and then decide how you want to grow your business.  If you are a numbers and charts person, our Carrier Shipping Rates Calculator can be eyeopening. 

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Shipwire has long offered fulfillment for the eBay marketplace via our PayPal IPN fulfillment and PayPal Buy-Now cart fulfillment integrations.  We are happy to offer as a free public beta an improved eBay auctions fulfillment and shipping connection.

This new eBay integration directly connects Shipwire to your eBay auctions.  When your eBay auction closes, Shipwire will receive the transaction information so that we can automatically fulfill your eBay order from our warehouses in the U.S., Canada and the Europe.  Once your order has shipped, Shipwire will send back to eBay Selling Manager all shipping tracking information so that buyers can know that their order has shipped and track the shipment with the carrier.  End-to-end automated eBay Selling Manager fulfillment.

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