I'm in the final stages of evaluating Smith Cart for a new web site we're developing.  But I've encountered a stumbling block regarding international shipping that I hope you can help with.

We're located in the US.  We currently ship domestic orders by Priority Mail and we ship international orders via Express Mail International service.

I've selected these as the possible shipping methods in my cart setup.

I'm encountering 4 issues with international shipping:

1. When a customer enters an international address, there's always a field for the State/Region -- even for countries that don't use state or region.  On our current site, before we fixed this (to use jscript to only show this box for countries that use state/region) this was very confusing for international customers. They feel forced to "make something up" and this results in a bad address on the receiving end.
2. The shipping methods shown in the drop-down list also appear to be shown irrespective of the destination country.  In other words, a customer from India can select Priority Mail, even though there IS no priority mail service outside the US.
3. If the customer chooses a shipping method that doesn't apply for a given address (such as Priority Mail to a non-US address) the cart doesn't generate any sort of error clear message.  Rather it shows "Please click the "Calculate Shipping" button below before checking out." over the address, and shows zero dollars for shipping in the cart.  This is VERY confusing.
4. The biggest probelm -- and I really hope you can help me with this cuz it's a biggie for us -- is that I can't get the cart to quote international shipping via Express Mail International.  When a (valid) non-US address is supplied, and the customer chooses "Express Mail" and clicks "Calculate Shipping" they get the sort of generic error I (tried to) describe in item 3, above.

Smith Cart seems to be a terrific cart that comes very close to meeting our needs... but we really DO need shipping to non-US addresses to work smoothly.  At least 50% of our sales is to non-US addresses.

Please help?

Peter

Thanks, Dave, for your very thorough and clear reply. I've sent off to support for the hotfix. Whew! I was worried for a while there!

Regarding your replies:

1) It would be nice if you dimmed the field, changed it to read-only, and/or filled it in with "(not used)" or something in this case. Seriously, we have this problem with our international customers all the time.

2) I follow your reasoning here. With most shipping providers, there are typically separate classes of service for domestic and international service. I guess I was merely suggesting that you differentiate these, and select among them based on country != home country. Perhaps that's a US-centric view of the process, however.

3) Where this really breaks down is when the customer selects an inappropriate shipping method, calculates shipping, and then is prompted to "calculate shipping" again... except there ARE no available methods in the drop-down. Consider the case of countries that are simply not covered by any of the shipping methods a store supports. For example, USPS Express Mail International will accept shipments to Togo, but not to Tuvalu (these are my two test cases). In this case, we simply won't accept orders in our store from customers that want to ship to Tuvalu. Perhaps if there are no available methods, the cart should generate a clear message?

4) Hey, that's right! I had to fix the code on our existing site for that change... it took place right at the beginning of the calendar year. Thanks... I'm anxious to get that hot fix from you guys.

Thank you again for your clear and intelligent replies to my issues. They're definitely much appreciated.

Peter