Our paper craft export products are gaining increasing interest from retailers in Russia. Typically our shipments to any other country go by air freight via TNT, DHL or FedEx. However, we have just ran into our first serious set of obstacles with sending shipments to Russia:

1) The normal carriers either cannot provide door-to-door service for areas outside the major cities. We have customers in Krasnoyarsk and Archangelsk. We have found routing on commercial airlines to Moscow and customs routing onto S7 (Russian carrier) for flight to Krasnoyarsk, but extremely expensive considering that the wholesale value of these shipments are between 500 USD and 3000 USD.

2.) Russian customs regulations for commercial shipments going to these "outer areas" has limited our shipments to roughly a gross weight of 20 kg per shipment per week to each consignee. This is a problem, but not exactly the biggest one....

3.) Russian customs regulations limit the value of the goods at 5,000 RUB (approx. 150 USD) per cosignee per week. But Russian customs requires that the value of goods must include freight charges. Freight charges alone for a shipment like this (via EMS for example whom offers door-to-door rates in Russia) are already around 300 USD. So there is no room in the customs valuation for us to even claim any value for the goods.

I am wondering how on Earth people living and running businesses outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg receive international commercial shipments that not large enough to be considered for LCL sea freight, etc. I wonder how companies like eBay and Amazon send medium sized air freight shipments to Russia and are able to do so affordable and without exceeding customs limits.

Can anyone provide some advice? ■