Best rates for International shipping?

[snarlpill]

Alright guys, help me out here. My friend's company just launched its new site (which I made ), and is also accepting BTC as payment, by the way  .

We want to make the products available worldwide, so that anybody can enjoy his quality products and cheap prices, and nobody is excluded. However, I need to set the shipping rates for worldwide orders, and therein lies the problem. When I was checking shipping quotes with UPS, FedEX, and USPS (All standard vendors we would normally consider), even using an under-4 pound shipping weight and small box, rates were Outrageous. I'm talking $80-200 just to ship a $10 order in a small box that weighs less than 4 pounds (little less than 2 Kg.) ! 

So does anybody know of any alternative international-shipping vendors that are not so outrageously priced? I know worldwide people who order from US companies are used to paying a lot more for shipping, but damn.

Also, all online price quotes have a spot to fill out for estimated Customs declaration value. I've heard it's a lot cheaper to send as a "Gift."

Thanks in advance to any and all help and advice given,
snarlpill

[Lethn]

lol good luck finding anything cheaper than that, unfortunately international shipping is an expensive business and customers are going to have to accept a price rise if they want to get it internationally, I can tell you I ordered some very nice gemstones from Thailand recently and it cost $6.99 supposedly and I don't think there's really any way round it, if you're going to become an international business the export/import costs are something to bear in mind.

The only thing I could suggest is maybe getting the prices down in other areas like looking for bulk deals and wholesale deals on the materials you're buying and then that way you could still keep the prices the same but again, at least with physical products international shipping is always going to be expensive, makes me extremely grateful that all my manga copies will be digital and can just be downloaded.

Now I've had a coffee and looked closer you're problem is clearly sending small packages which for some reason are always pricier, when I ordered my gemstones I found that it was far better value for some reason to order 4 gemstones as opposed to 1 because when I ordered 1 it was the same price so it looks like when it comes to physical stuff bulk deals are king, I realise that's not much comfort if you're sending stuff out to individual customers but maybe you could do what other shops do and charge less for buying a chunk of your product to increase the weight etc. but have them pay more for 1 product because of the cost associated with it.