Article: Why a separate website for the United States?
Why a separate website for the United States?
Let's acknowledge - global commerce presents challenges and is set to become more demanding.
Rudradhan LLC and this e-commerce website was curated for our esteemed clientele abroad, ensuring a seamless local shopping experience rather than inflating prices. In our opinion, the benefit of engaging in a local transaction from a consumer's POV, surpasses the cost premium.
As a discerning consumer residing in the United States, or any location beyond the seller's borders - procuring from an overseas online platform entails a myriad of issues and uncertainties. Let us delineate these obstacles and briefly examine each:
International Shipping - Because gold & silver jewellery are dutiable in most countries, the minimum shipping cost to legally ship even a silver made needle weighing upto 500gms from India to USA is around US$70! Some daring couriers may offer to handle it for half the price, yet they resort to deceit by declaring the jewelry as "artificial". Such dishonesty in import-export endeavors is forbidden in most nations and can result in severe consequences - not limited to confiscation of the goods.
Since all packages get the x-ray treatment, no need to stress about taking the sketchy route to save a few bucks. Better safe than sorry, right?
International Payments - International credit cards have a mind of their own, well sometimes. Your bank might decline the transaction to mitigate their risk of potential fraud. The transaction fees are likely obscure, yet undoubtedly higher compared to domestic transactions. Besides, Paypal charges 11-15% in fees to Indian sellers, a fee which is simply too high to bear and hence passed on in price. For the same reasons, we disabled international payments on our Indian webstore.
Despite being an American business, this webstore caters as a domestic shop to these countries besides USA. As examples, you can use googlepay to make a purchase on this website from Australia! Or Applepay from Canada!. Or your domestic HSBC credit card from UK!.
Delivery Schedule - Oftentimes, we make a purchase with a specific delivery timeline in mind - such as requiring the jewelry for a particular event, let's say 25 days ahead. While a commercial airline journey from India to the USA may be swift, the transportation of goods across borders is a more intricate process, often prolonged - particularly when custom duty is applicable to the product, such as gold and silver jewelry which are dutiable in most nations.
This store pledges a delivery schedule on every product page and compensation for failing the promised timeline, a commitment we are bound by American law to fulfil. To put it blunty, a foreign business can make a promise, but is not legally obligated to fulfil it!
Custom/Import Duty Hassles - Many Indian sites tackle this with a vague, boring response:
"The duties and taxes for International deliveries outside of India shall be borne at the recipient’s end"
Returns & Refunds - So you ordered something from an Indian website and want to return it and get a refund? Good luck - it is just too complicated for both parties and mostly shall never work out. Just the round trip shipping and duty + tax back into India will certainly exceed the price of the merchandise (the total tax for importing anything dutiable into India beyond INR 5000 (< us$58) is nearly 50% !.
We promise a free 1 day return policy for USA when ordering here.
To conclude, we believe that purchasing from a domestic company online is consistently more convenient, safer, and more reliable than an international transaction. The safeguarding of rights under local laws, free shipping, absence of payment fees, and prepaid custom duties validate the slightly higher cost.
Ofcourse, if the lower price is of utmost concern for you, you are welcome to make a purchase from the Indian website, but only for delivery and payment within India.
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