invenio: 4) What you are describing is a logistic headache for a company and the primary buyer.
If you have to tell someone
"It's not available, because we didn't think you wanted it anyways", you're already wrong and have lost a customer,
because it was not made available to them. Chicken and egg.
Also, it's not a logistic headache for the customer, because the customer knows and pays extra for import, and the business has an established procedure to export. The argument was
"why not have these procedures", after all. If you do, it's not a nightmare. What's more, ordering for importing usually makes customers think and check twice because they know they don't want to have to return anything.
invenio: 2) Shipping from china usually takes about 2-3 weeks for me in the US. Rarely a month.
And shipping back is still faster, so the point stands.
invenio: Also, if an item is lost, the business may be the one taking the loss as I can initiate a chargeback with my credit card company and they almost always side with the card holder if there was no delivery confirmation.
But chargebacks are what gets your account penalized in online shops, because in business culture, chargebacks are known as a "dick move". You contact them to deal with it like you do (should!) with local orders, instead. Going straight for a chargeback is rather rude.
And, just don't offer shipping with no delivery confirmation. Even local amazon mail always requires a signature, here.
Possibly interesting tidbit: Credit Cards are, AFAIK, a USA thing. Nobody I know has an actual credit card if they have not been to the USA. We do bank transfer / debit entry (14 days "chargeback" window, I think? And only with asterisk.), or use PayPal. That's how it is for germany, at least. Shops shipping international but requiring a credit card to order from are what breaks it for germany quite often. Nobody has credit cards here!
invenio: A company may only want to work with one shipper for discount purposes or ease of shipping management. [...] shipping in the US is relatively easy and inexpensive [...]
See, we're on the same page, after all. Because that's, as I said,
BlackSun: So yes, in the end it does come down to businesses
actually just not caring enough to sell their product outside of the US.
Shipping costs are, still, paid by the customer. But of course they still have other "reasons", I'm just saying more often than not, those are rather flakey "reasons", and thus lazy. Among the lines of,
"Eeeehh... yeah it's probably not gonna be worth the effort..."