We've been considering making a significant change to our charging model (but only an idea!). And I'd be really grateful if anyone could give their gut feeling response... In fact, it would be especially if you were able to give TWO responses: (1) your own; and (2) how you think most ordinary American web users would respond.

The background to this is that as some of you will know, we get quite a lot of flak from customers in the US and Canada who resent paying import duties and/or shipping charges. (And PLEASE let's not rehearse all the old Fedex/DHL arguments again here... pretty please!). And neither we nor they much like airmail either, untracked, with a delivery schedule that can take weeks.

Added to this is the fact that Americans are, by and large, not very used to dealing with overseas businesses. So there's often a bit of a fear factor to overcome too.

We've considered setting up a US distribution hub, to address this. But the logistics just don't add up. So we're now considering another approach.

This would be to change our pricing model for our customers in the USA and Canada, to INCLUDE both rapid courier shipping, and all import duties. We'd also offer firm prices in US dollars, so that the price you saw was the price you'd pay, in your local currency, with 1-2 day delivery (from stock) to pretty much anywhere in North America.

Obviously this would mean putting our prices up to compensate, but only by the additional costs, and on average these prices would be much the same as UK pricing including our own VAT and delivery. And by and large our pricing is pretty low, so I think an increase of maybe 20% would still leave us quite competitive with local US based retailers, even on headline pricing.

We would, however, have to remove the option of slow airmail, with a good chance on escaping the import duties altogether. This option would in fact still be available to American customers by choosing to view our site in UK pounds and doing your own arithmetic... and we'd make sure that more informed users like the XMTS community knew to do this if they wished to...

My own gut feeling is that a lot of Americans would be much more comfortable with a pitch that guaranteed NO additional charges, and FAST 1-2 delivery, and that by taking away a lot of the fear factor with overseas shopping we might more than compensate for those customers we lost from higher headline prices.

But I'm only guessing! What do you guys think? Again, please if you can give me your take on how you think Mr or Mrs Middle America would respond, as well as your own view. (And again, it would be great if we could refrain from letting this degenerate into another rehash of the old arguments about shippers and customs policies etc.!!)

Thanks!

Nick