Shipping to Australia and the UK from Shopify: carriers, promises and customs

Who pays the import charges, you or the customer?

Decide this before you look at a single carrier rate, because it determines what the checkout total says and which carriers you can use.

Shopify's help center describes the two terms plainly. With Delivered Duty Paid (DDP), "the seller assumes responsibility for any import costs that might be payable when goods cross borders", and you can collect them at checkout so the customer sees one total. With DAP, the seller only handles shipping and the customer pays import costs to the carrier. The same page warns that DAP "might result in additional charges to the customer".

Our view: DDP is the better default for a store that wants repeat buyers in these markets. A customer who is asked for money at the door tends to blame the store, not customs. DAP is defensible for high-value, low-volume catalog items where you would rather not carry the tax estimate risk, but say so clearly before payment. Our post on duties at checkout covers why the surprise charge hurts so much, and duty-paid pricing covers the pricing side.

Does the carrier choice depend on that decision?

Yes, and this is the part that catches stores out after they have already configured checkout. Per Shopify's documentation, DDP labels bought through Shopify's carrier accounts are available only for Canada Post (US destinations only), DHL Express, DHL Express Canada and DHL eCommerce, and only if you collect duties at checkout. For other carriers, Shopify says you cannot buy a label for an order where duties were collected, so you buy the label outside Shopify or refund the order.

In practice that means: if you collect duties at checkout and ship from the US to the UK or Australia, a DHL service is the path of least friction inside Shopify's own label flow. Anything else works only if you buy labels from the carrier or a shipping tool directly and pass the DDP information through yourself. Check the current list before you commit, because it is a vendor-controlled list and it changes.

If you use a 3PL, the same question applies to them. Ask which carrier accounts they hold, whether they can print DDP-marked labels, and who produces the commercial invoice. Do not assume it is covered.

How does UK VAT change what you charge?

For the UK the rule is specific enough to build around. GOV.UK's guidance says that for consignments of £135 or less sold from outside the UK to customers in Great Britain, UK supply VAT is charged at the point of sale. Consignments above £135 follow normal VAT and customs rules on importation.

Two details matter for a Shopify store. First, "The £135 limit applies to the value of a total consignment that is imported", so a basket is judged as a whole. Second, if you own goods in the UK at the point of sale, you must register for VAT on direct sales to UK customers, which is a different situation from shipping from the US. The same guidance lets a seller skip VAT when a UK business gives a valid VAT number, with the customer accounting for it instead. Excise goods and non-commercial gifts are outside these rules.

The practical consequence is that a UK shopper should see a VAT-inclusive price, and you need a VAT registration to charge it legitimately. That is a decision for your accountant, not for your theme. Our post on tax registration thresholds explains when selling abroad gets complicated.

What about Australia?

Australia has its own low-value goods regime for GST on goods sold from overseas, and the details (the value threshold, the registration trigger and how the tax is calculated) are set by the Australian Taxation Office. We could not load the ATO's page when we wrote this, so we are not quoting figures. Read the ATO's current guidance on GST for non-resident sellers before you set an Australian checkout, and confirm with an Australian-aware accountant.

What we can say from the shipping side is that the pattern mirrors the UK: whoever is registered and collecting tax at the point of sale should show a tax-inclusive price, and goods above the low-value limit usually go through normal customs clearance, where the importer pays on arrival. Build both routes into your shipping settings rather than assuming every parcel takes the simple one.

Express service or a local 3PL?

Start with express shipping from the US. It is simple, tracked end to end, and a DHL-style service handles customs paperwork. The cost is per parcel and rises with weight, and it is the right choice while you are testing whether a market buys at all.

A local 3PL, or a split of stock, earns its place when volume is steady enough to ship pallets rather than parcels, when your average order is low enough that international postage eats the margin, or when returns are a real cost. The usual pattern is stock held in-country, domestic delivery, and import charges paid once on the bulk shipment instead of per parcel. The trade-off is inventory risk and a second location to reconcile, which is why we would not start there. Routing between locations is covered in order routing across warehouses and a 3PL.

Rates by market are a Shopify setup task, not a theme task: create a profile or zone for each country and name the options for what the customer receives, not the carrier product. If you need to hide an option for one market, Shopify Functions can do it, and since the 2026-10 API version a delivery option's metafields can be read by a function, which lets a carrier service pass structured data to a customization without packing it into option titles. Metafields on a delivery option are not persisted after checkout.

What should you promise at checkout?

Promise the window you hit nine times out of ten, not the one you hit when everything goes well. International parcels have a long tail: customs holds, a missing invoice, a wrong HS code, a public holiday at the other end. A promise of "3 to 5 days" that is met in 6 is worse than "5 to 9 days" met in 7.

Measure it. Ship twenty parcels to each market, record the order date, the dispatch date and the delivery date, and use the slow end of that range. Then split the promise in two on the page: when it leaves you, and the carrier's transit window. Our post on fulfillment SLAs goes through what to commit to and where to say it.

Say plainly on the product page, cart and checkout whether import charges are included. A short sentence ("Duties and taxes are included in your total" or "Import charges may be collected on delivery") removes most of the support tickets this topic generates.

What should stay in place after launch?

International shipping is a running operation, not a setting. Someone should own the carrier account, review the delivery-time data monthly, and watch for refused or returned parcels, since those mean customs or price surprises you have not removed. Returns deserve their own plan: a return from Australia or the UK to a US warehouse costs real money, and a local return address is often the first thing a local 3PL pays for. This is the ongoing store management work our Shopify support service covers.

Questions this raises

Read next

• Shopify support and store management
• Duties at checkout and the post-purchase surprise
• Fulfillment SLAs and what your storefront should promise