Global Logistics
Gain a better understanding of how Global Logistics works and what your configuration options are
Global Logistics (GL) is an end-to-end cross-border delivery management solution that can provide a guaranteed landed cost to both you and your customers.
In the pre-launch phase, you work closely with Digital River and one of our global logistics providers (GLPs) to build an integration that can accept and process international orders.
During checkouts, GL allows you to present customers with a menu of shipping quotes. Once the customer places an order and the goods are picked and packed at the warehouse, your third-party logistics provider can use GL to print shipping labels.
When an order's products ship, you can also use GL to track their progress.
On this page, you'll find information on how GL works as well as Digital River's guaranteed landed cost feature and our GLPs. You can also read about the pre-deployment process.
How you interact with Global Logistics during checkouts depends on the integration path(s) you've selected. Use the following table to access the appropriate article:
Checkout solution | Article |
|---|---|
Once the order is created, you'll also need to send the ship request, get shipping labels, and track orders. For details on how to handle these, and other processes, refer to Managing a Global Logistics orders.
During checkouts, Global Logistics (GL) can be used to request international shipping quotes. GL routes the request to the appropriate global logistics provider (GLP) and then returns a menu of shipping quotes that can be displayed to customers.
Once customers select a shipping quote, their choice is applied to the checkout, and then, assuming they selected a quote with delivered duty paid (DDP) terms, customers can be presented with a transaction's full landed cost.
After the order is submitted, your commerce system must send a ship request to your third-party logistics (3PL) provider so that they can pick and pack the goods at the warehouse. When your 3PL is ready to print a shipping label, they send a request to Digital River, which we route to the appropriate GLP.
Upon receipt of this request, the GLP generates one or more shipping labels, sends those labels back to Digital River and we relay them to your 3PL.
The shipping label request also prompts the GLP to prepare the order's international shipping documentation. The GLP bundles this documentation in a pre-clearance request that gets sent to the destination country's customs agency.
Once the shipping labels are generated, a carrier retrieves the goods from the warehouse. In the hub and spoke logistics model, the carrier delivers the products to a distribution hub before they are moved to an export gateway and then shipped to the end customer's address. In the hubless model, the carrier delivers the goods directly to an export gateway, where they are shipped to the final destination.
After the goods arrive in the destination country, the GLP ensures that they clear customs, moves them to a distribution site and coordinates with local carriers to deliver them the "final mile" to the end customer.
Once the shipping labels are generated, you can also use GL to track an order's shipments. For each shipment, we provide you information on its products and status, as well as events that occur at specific locations along a delivery's route.
Depending on the GLP that is facilitating the transaction, the Global Logistics solution can potentially give both you and your customers a guaranteed landed cost.
With this feature, Digital River guarantees that you won't be charged any additional duties, fees, or import taxes beyond those contained in the order. This is true even when the actual importation costs assessed by a country's customs agency are higher than those returned by our landed cost calculator.
We also guarantee that customers who select a shipping quote with delivered duty paid terms won't be required to pay any additional costs at the time of delivery. In other words, customers will have no surprise fees. Whatever they pay at the time of order placement is the final amount.
Shipping is not part of a guaranteed landed cost. During checkouts, if customers select a shipping quote whose
totalAmount is less than the actual, carrier assessed shipping costs, then Digital River is not responsible for the difference.In the Global Logistics solution, you partner with one or more of Digital River's global logistics providers (GLPs).
Digital River's GLPs specialize in shipping physical goods across national borders and are considered international logistics experts. They are well-versed in country-specific regulatory requirements, understand how to prepare the commercial invoices which act as the basis for all other international shipping documents, and have the capability to electronically submit pre-clearance requests to most countries' customs agencies.
Digital River's GLPs also have proprietary international shipping lanes, various export gateways, numerous final mile delivery options, and multiple logistics model offerings.
In the pre-deployment phase, you collaborate with Digital River and one or more of our global logistics providers (GLPs) to define your international trading patterns, configure product data, and set up your logistics.
The following sections describe the major areas of work that need to occur prior to deployment:
In the pre-deployment phase, you must define your trading patterns. In other words, where your products ship from and where customers can have them shipped to. These patterns are then saved to your account.
Prior to launch, you must assign basic data to each cross-border eligible product in your catalog. This mainly consists of defining a product's name, weight, URL, image, and country of origin.
All of your products must be assigned a name and should ideally have a description as well.
For each of your cross-border eligible products, you should determine its weight in grams, kilograms, ounces, or pounds and then store this value. A product's weight:
- Helps ensure that the shipping quotes returned in the checkout process are as accurate as possible. If weight is not sent in a shipping quotes request or a value is passed that's less than its true weight, the shipping costs paid by the customer will likely be lower than the actual, carrier assessed costs. After an order is submitted, carriers compare a package's gross weight to its dimensions and then use dimensional weight pricing to calculate shipping costs. These carrier computed costs are what you ultimately pay.
- Must be listed in the customs documentation for certain countries. This means that when customers want to ship a product to one of these countries, Digital River needs its weight to return a landed cost in checkouts. Additionally, customs officials need weight to calculate duties and import taxes.
A product's weight should be exclusive of its packaging but inclusive of its dunnage. In other words, don't include the weight of the product's box but do include the weight of the protective and supporting materials that go inside the box.
A product's image and URL typically get added to the customs documentation, which officials use to make a pre-clearance determination. While performing this process, these officials can use the URL to access a description of the product and the image to see what the product looks like.
A product's country of origin represents where a product was manufactured. The country value you pass to Digital River must be the same as what is listed on the product's certificate of origin.
Prior to deployment, Digital River and your GLP work with you to define this data. Once defined, a product's compliance data is stored in an associated SKU group.
The following describes some of the compliance data that must be defined during the prelaunch process:
Each product must be associated with a tax code. It determines whether the product is classified as physical or digital. To ensure that the correct product taxes are assessed, the code should be as accurate as possible.
You'll need to provide Digital River with sufficient details about your products so that we can determine their tax codes and then add this data to the relevant SKU group.
A product must have a Digital River approved Export Control Classification Number (ECCN). This value determines whether the product:
- Requires a U.S. export/re-export license
- Contains any other license requirements/restrictions
- Has an end use which is prohibited by applicable export control laws
Before launching, we work with you to identify your product's ECCNs and then store them in the relevant SKU groups.
You need to provide Digital River with sufficient details about your products so that we can classify their harmonized system (HS) codes. This includes the six-digit universal HS code used to classify product groups at the international level as well as the country-specific code.
These country-specific codes almost always have more digits than the universal code. Customs officials around the world use them to identify the duty and import tax rates that should be applied to different product groups. They are also needed by Digital River to generate a landed cost calculation.
Certain products are classified as dangerous goods. They're considered to be any substance or material that poses unreasonable health, safety, or property risk when transported.
For example, some products, such as lithium batteries and (in)flammable perfumes, are susceptible to static electricity as well as temperature and pressure variations. These forces can cause them to leak, emit toxic fumes, ignite, or even explode. This is especially true when they are transported by air. As a result, these categories of products require special packaging, handling, and modes of transportation.
In the pre-launch phase, the GLP might review your product labels to determine what products in your catalog may contain ingredients that necessitate a dangerous goods classification.
Once the GLP completes their review, they provide us a list of these products, along with their classification values. We then store this compliance data.
When you a shipping quotes request is sent, Digital River determines whether any products in that request are flagged as dangerous goods. If this is the case, we pass this information to the GLP and they add the appropriate surcharges, which Digital River then adds to the shipping quotes response.
After an order is submitted, and its products have been picked and packed at the warehouse, the 3PL sends a shipping label request that gets transformed by Digital River and routed to the appropriate GLP. The GLP uses the data in this transformed request to determine whether the shipment contains any dangerous goods. If it does, they flag the entire shipment for special packaging and/or handling and encode that information in the shipping labels data that gets returned to the 3PL.
In the pre-deployment process, you should also determine what signature requirements your products may have. In other words, which products require customers to sign for them at the time of delivery.
These are often high-value items that you don't want to be left on the customer's "doorstep" by the delivery person. Putting a signature requirement in place helps prevent their theft.
You can optionally define and save a default box. Also, depending on the sophistication of the warehouse management software (WMS) you access, you may also decide to employ packing algorithms.
Our GL solution allows you to define a default box. In other words, a box configured with a default weight, height, width, and length. Digital River then saves these values to your account.
If you configure a default box, and packaging data is not sent in the shipping quotes request or shipping labels request, Global Logistics passes these saved measurements to the GLP.
We recommend that you set a default box when you know that the vast majority of your products are going to be shipped in packages with uniform dimensions and a standardized weight. You can work with your WMS provider to identify your most frequently used box size.
Inefficient packing can result in higher shipping costs. This is because carriers often use dimensional weight pricing, which is meant to incentivize efficient packing methods.
If your WMS uses bin packing algorithms, you can use them to potentially lower your shipping costs. These algorithms attempt to solve the problem of how to most efficiently pack multiple items of various sizes into a finite number of boxes. Based on the dimensions of a shipment's products, they return the recommended number of boxes and the optimal dimensions of each.
If you have access to such algorithms, work with your WMS provider to build an integration that allows you to request suggested box counts and dimensions during checkout so that they can be passed in the shipping quotes request.
Pre-launch, the GLP reviews your warehouse locations, anticipated shipping volumes, and trading patterns. The GLP then identifies potential carriers and gets their applicable shipping methods and rates.
Once compiled, the GLP stores this data in their system. During the checkout process, when a shipping quotes request is made, the GLP accesses this saved data and uses it to construct a list of order-specific shipping quotes. A simplified version of this list is returned in the shipping quotes response.
Prior to deployment, the GLP analyzes your warehouse locations, trading patterns, applicable carriers and expected ship volumes. Based on the results of this analysis, the GLP makes a logistics model determination.
More specifically, the GLP informs you whether (1) a hub and spoke logistics model or (2) a hubless logistics model best suits your needs. In both models, the GLP acts as the cross-border shipment manager.
The 3PL then requests and prints a shipping label whose designated ship to address is one of the GLP's domestic, in-country hubs.
The products are then moved from your 3PL's warehouse to the specified hub.
Once the products arrive there, the GLP prints another shipping label whose designated ship to address is the final destination of the goods, moves the goods to an export gateway, and then ships them to the destination country.
The 3PL then requests and prints a shipping label whose designated ship to address is the final destination of the goods.
The GLP then dispatches a carrier to retrieve the products from your 3PL's warehouse, moves the goods to an export gateway, and ships them to the destination country.
- Prepares the import-export documentation
- Submits pre-clearance requests to the importation country's custom agency
- Ensures that the goods clear customs
- Resolves any issues should the goods get "stuck in customs"
- Coordinates with local carriers to ensure that the products are transported the "final mile" to the customer's designated ship to address
In the pre-deployment phase, you work with Digital River and a GLP to design a reverse logistics flow that aligns with your business objectives and return policies. Since international returns are complex, there are a wide variety of ways to process reversals.
At a minimum, however, you should:
Throughout the order flow, make sure you provide customers with consistent and detailed return instructions.
For each of your approved ship to countries, the GLP supplies you with an address where customers must send returned products. The GLP can give you these return addresses prior to deployment and/or at runtime.
At run-time, the GLP sends Digital River an order-specific return address during shipping label generation. We then transmit this return to address to you in both the shipping label response and the logistics return response.
We recommend you carefully consider how you want to provide this address (along with other return instructions) to customers. For example, you could provide this information in shipment notification emails, order invoices, and/or on a customer's order management page.
Prior to accepting international orders, you'll work with the GLP to review your catalog and identify goods that may be subject to strict re-importation restrictions. With such product types, returns are often not feasible.
Health and beauty products frequently fall into this category. For example, due to tampering concerns, some exported cosmetics and supplements are either not allowed back into the United States or, if they are, require Food and Drug Administration approval.
International shipping is expensive. In some cases, the expense of returning a product to its origin warehouse is greater than its manufacturing cost or purchase value. As a result, you may decide to destroy or liquidate such goods rather than facilitate their return. We recommend you work with the GLP to identify these product types, and, once identified, develop an appropriate disposition plan for them.
You should also keep in mind that a product may be subject to import duties on its return journey. For example, if a product with a declared value of $1500 is exported out of the United States and then later returned to its origin warehouse, that same product, because it exceeds the US De Minimis value, could be assessed re-importation duties.
For each of your product types, you'll need to work with the GLP to establish a disposition agreement. The terms of this agreement stipulate under what conditions the GLP should either:
- Destroy the product, assess you a fee for doing so, and then generate a certificate of physical destruction.
- Liquidate the product by selling it at a predetermined price and then shipping it to an agreed-upon location.
- Return the product to one of your 3PL's warehouses so that it can be put back into inventory.
You can also establish price thresholds with GLPs which they then use to determine what type of disposition to perform. For example, a disposition agreement may specify that the GLP should destroy any products worth less than $100, liquidate products that have a value between $100 and $200, and return any higher valued items.
Before permitting a shipment to clear customs, importation countries collect duties and taxes. Once collected, most countries don't refund these costs simply because customers experienced a 'change-of-heart' or decided the merchandise is 'not as described'.
So, prior to checking out customers, you should identify the conditions that prompt you to issue refunds on duties and import taxes.
The Refunds API provides you the ability to customize refunds that you issue customers. For example, at the order level, we support full and partial refunds on duties and import taxes. And at the item-level, you can configure duty refunds in the same way.
If you do refund duties and import taxes, then keep in mind that you're responsible for seeking reimbursement from the applicable agency in the importation country.
One option might be to devise your returns policy so duty paid is refunded on defective and damaged products but not for 'change-of-heart' returns. You could also adopt a similar policy for refunding shipping costs. Alternatively, you might decide to refund only product costs in all scenarios.
Last modified 5d ago