PayPal: Do You Ship Internationally?

I met a merchant at a bazaar (in real life) who had some exciting merchandise. She directed me to her web site to showcase the remainder of her inventory. I was interested in buying a gift for an overseas friend, and thus asked the merchant:

Do you ship internationally?

She said "yes, I can do that!" Overjoyed, I browsed to her web site, powered by PayPal's shopping cart system. After filling my cart, I then had been escorted to the PayPal checkout flow.

I'm always a bit confused by the PayPal checkout flow. It is designed to coerce the user into using default payment settings (bank account instead of credit card, which is cheaper for PayPal to process). I managed to pull up the shipping address dialog in order to input my giftee's UK home address.

I was surprised to find this:

The country field was set to United States, and was unchangeable. At that moment, I had become consumed with the question "why can't I ship outside of the United States???" After all, I had confirmed with the merchant, face-to-face, that it was possible. 

Rule of thumb #1: Avoid telling the user "no," especially when the user knows the answer is actually "yes".

To me, it was straightforward: shipping companies do ship outside of the USA. All the merchant needed to do was to stick an address label on the box, and all I needed to do was to pay the shipping fee. What would ever be the case for bolting down the country field? The only complications I could imagine are 1) taxes 2) export restrictions. Taxation, with all of its vast complexity, already has been implemented by PayPal, and would have been an inappropriate justification for altogether preventing my order. Export restrictions are an edge case, and had not been applicable here.

I started to pursue a solution to this problem. I had contacted both the merchant and PayPal tech support (twice). The merchant noted that, in her browser, she did have the option to ship internationally. She suggested working around this, by requiring that I provide a US shipping address, and then that I pay the remaining shipping costs in ad hoc manner. I was resistant, because this would have put me at risk, and also would have entailed my acquiescence to the flaws of a bad product. No one could answer the simple question of "why is this happening?" The best suggestion that had come from PayPal tech support was "there's something wrong with the merchant's integration." Both I, the user, and they, the support experts, were staring at the exterior of a black box whose inner contents were utterly mystifying.

Rule of thumb #2: If you must tell the user "no", provide an accompanying explanation, with actionable steps.

Imagine how much time would have been saved if the address form just noted "this item cannot be shipped internationally due to the merchant's preferences (or due to export restrictions). Please contact the merchant." Imagine, additionally, a button that auto-emails the merchant a message from a @paypal.com e-mail address with a boilerplate explanation of "a potential customer of yours desires to ship internationally. Here's how to reconfigure your shopping cart integration to do so." This functionality would not only greatly benefit me, the customer, but it would also benefit the merchant, and would leave out tech support altogether. Note that these fixes are rather cheap and easy, implementable in a few hours by a mediocre developer.

Unfortunately, the developers didn't have the prescience to implement this functionality. They erroneously decided that a hardcoded text field is just fine, when actually, it's rather tyrannical. The instinct for good user experience was just not present.

The next steps suggested by tech support were for me to implore the merchant to contact merchant tech support to ask for help in fixing a problem that she didn't care to fix. There is plenty wrong with this, but I may perhaps leave the analysis for a later date.