In this mini episode, co-host Jason Rowland welcomes Amanda Meadows, Head of Partnerships, Asendia USA and Brian Dunagan, Senior Director, Strategic Partnerships at GlobalPost to discuss the challenges of international shipping in 2025 and how GlobalPost is tackling them. Touching on the importance of transparent pricing, duties and taxes, and Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) services in enhancing the e-commerce experience, discover how smarter logistics and proactive strategies are helping brands deliver products smoothly and keep customers happy worldwide.

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Brian Dunagan is a results-driven executive specializing in strategic partnerships, business development, and digital innovation. He combines strong product management and go-to-market expertise with operational leadership to drive growth across both B2B and B2C markets. Brian has extensive experience building and scaling teams while enabling collaboration across matrixed organizations. Known for recruiting and mentoring high-performing professionals, he leads with a people-first philosophy focused on empowerment, passion, and integrity.

I think when you think about product, you have to consider shipping as part of that.

And what I mean is you may have the best product in the world, you might have the right user interface, you might have the right flow, but if you don't have the right shipping process as part of that, you're going to have customers not purchase it. And it's all because you didn't factor shipping into the product development side of it.

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Go Outside the Box with Asendia USA.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Outside the Box with Asendia USA podcast. I am your co-host for today, Jason Rowland. And we are here with two new people that you may not have seen before.

One is Asendia USA's head of partnerships, Amanda Meadows. Welcome. Amanda, why don't introduce yourself to the audience a little bit and tell them what you're here for?

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Super excited to be here. I've been with Essendia a quick six months.

Super excited to work with the partnerships and our platforms and work with Brian. Brian and I have worked together in a couple different lives previously.

True.

Yeah. So super excited to have you on the show. We appreciate you coming in and I'll move it over to you to introduce yourself.

Yeah, sure. So. Well, first of all, thanks for having me, guys. Brian Dunnigan, I'm with GlobalPost. I'm senior director of Partnerships.

Prior to GlobalPost, I was with FedEx for 16 plus years. So I got a background a little bit across product marketing, partnerships, logistics, you name it. You can tell by the gray hair.

Been around for a little while. So I got a little bit of.

You've been in logistics for a while.

I got a little bit of experience, so.

For international trade, there were so many issues that the industry hadn't really faced before that now all of a sudden came to it, it was a tough year for a lot of companies. What were from the GlobalPost perspective, what were some of the biggest challenges that you guys faced?

Because let me put it this way, my mom said the word de minimis to me, so I have never heard her think of something like that in the past. And then on the way over here, just for this interview, I'm looking and one of the signs says duties and taxes paid up front.

Everyone knows and everyone's seen the news around tariffs and what's happening and duties and taxes.

And so when you think about that from an international shipping standpoint, there's nowhere else that that impacts it more than international shipping. So we had to figure out how do we manage through those challenges, those kind of new consumer expectations regarding international shipping?

And what does that mean? So if you, if you boil it down to a couple, I mean, one is that it's, it's, you know, how do I.

How do I still do international shipping in a way that makes it easy and friendly for my customer? That's one.

Two is, you know, how if you're thinking about what's happening from an E commerce perspective and the expectations from a customer standpoint, it's only continuing to grow in terms of what people expect to see online.

It's shifting. Yeah. The things that mattered before are different than the things that matter now.

And yeah, there's things that we worry about now that we never worried about for sure.

And you're influenced by every single different online interaction that you have, and no matter which one it is, your expectation level starts to increase because of those different interactions.

Yeah. And a lot of that is because, man, you know, to one of those things you and I were talking about a little while ago, customers hate supplies.

No, they don't like it. They want transparency. So we've seen a lot of card abandonment this year.

About 48% of consumers abandon the cart when they don't feel like the price is transparent. You know, nobody likes to receive a bill after the fact. You don't want to be billed duties and taxes.

And that's something new this year, that customers are having to give Social Security numbers and get bills in the mail from carriers for those charges. So what are some things that GlobalPost is doing to overcome these challenges? Just help the customer with some of this price transparency?

Yeah, for sure.

Well, that goes back to the point I made, what I saw when I came on the way over here, the sign about the advertising, and that's exactly what we're doing on the GlobalPost front too. It's, you know, duties and taxes up front.

So when you're in the process of checking out and you're about to make that purchase and you're figuring out the shipment from an international standpoint, the duties and taxes are calculated on the front end.

So that way you don't have to worry about is the customer that's going to receive this package going to have to pay something extra when they get it at the end. We fix that problem and we call it DDP Taxes and Duties and taxes included for a long name. But you get the idea in terms of what we do.

And so doing that simplifies the process from a customer standpoint, allows the, the, the interaction from an econ perspective to flow more simply.

Yeah, and it stops that, that sticker shock at the end, right?

Exactly, exactly.

And it also stops them from already ordering it, completing it. And then when they go to get their final item, somebody hands them a bill and goes, oh, to take that thing, you now need to pay me.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, well, it goes along the lines of what I just talked about there.

We have launched DDP GlobalPost plus, which dues in Texas included, that now allows those customers to be able to check out and see that price up front. So we just were able to do that into the market.

And by doing that, that creates the opportunity for customers to not be shocked, not be scared, not be worried about what's going to happen.

And so that's one of the things that we've done that really we think pinpoints the need and pinpoints against what customers desire in terms of their e commerce process and procedures right now.

So outside of that duty and tax upfront calculation, are there any other innovations that GlobalPost is excited about?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that, that we've done and what we continue to do is we always look at the process and the flow in general.

And so we have made it extremely simple for customers when they get to the cart or when they're in the process of picking their shipping, to be able to select GlobalPost and make it seamless and interact with the card itself.

And so we've done a tremendous amount of research and experience and testing to see what makes the most sense so that we don't have that card abandonment and we continue to roll those things out on a consistent basis.

And so much of that is really about designing around complexity.

For sure, you can take a process that underneath the surface is extremely complex and there's many moving parts, but to the customer's face, when they actually interact with it, you want it to be simple. Right. And you don't want to necessarily pass on all of those complexities that the industry is facing to the end user. Right.

So specifically on that, I guess, is GlobalPost doing anything else to help simplify that process and not pass it along to the end user?

Yeah, I mean, so that's. When you think about GlobalPost, the key to what GlobalPost does is it, I like to refer to as a term as easy to do business.

And so when that, and whether that be through the customer's eyes or the partner's eyes or whoever it is, it's the whole concept is easy to do business with. And what that means is that the term I like to use too is demystifies international shipping.

And so it makes it to where custom forms are already populated. You already understand what's going to happen. You know, the duties and taxes up front, everything is done for you. So it's simple on the back end.

And the point you were making earlier about just a second ago about product and how that ties into shipping is a really important. Because I think, I think when you think about product, you have to consider shipping as part of that.

And what I mean is it you may have the best product in the world, you might have the right user interface, you might have the right flow, but if you don't have the right shipping process as part of that, you're going to have customers not purchase it. And it's all because you didn't factor shipping into the product development side of it.

Right. They could have the easiest time making that purchase and getting that in their cart and fulfilling that.

But if the parcel doesn't get to them in a convenient way.

Exactly.

They might not come back.

But the inverse kind of is also true, I guess, in a lot of ways of you can have a logistics setup, physical logistics that are seamless, but if your underlying customer experience upfront is lacking, it doesn't matter how well you're good at moving things. If they're not ordering them, it has.

To work together and they have to complement each other.

And that's where GlobalPost does an excellent job of working with whoever the merchant is or the partner is to make sure that we are part of the process and working together to make it one flow for the customer checkout process.

Yeah. And that's so important to make it so that, you know, kind of a little bit like wizard of Oz. Right.

You don't want to see what's going on behind the curtain, you just want it to work.

So are you going to go over the sphere and check that?

I've been like, that was a plug for the sphere. It's right in front of my tickets, Jason.

I've been looking at that thing for three days.

One thing that came up in our previous conversations you talked about we help merchant ship with fewer apologies. I love that because you really do. You cater to so many different types of merchants.

Is somebody small that, you know, again, they don't know de minimis. They've never heard that word before.

Right.

All the way to the enterprise customer. So I really appreciate you guys, you know, you know, putting product and putting shipping into the cart and helping these customers through.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. The idea of ship with fewer, fewer apologies.

I mean, no one wants to be the, be the, the supplier that has some customer go through the process and then they're apologizing because they didn't get it, they didn't get on time, it didn't work. And now GlobalPost, because of the fact that we have things, we've simplified that process. We've made it easy to do business with.

We have the ability to show duties and taxes up front. You no longer have to worry about any of that because it's all, it's all handled right in the beginning and through the process.

And these international trade regulations are only going to get more complex from here.

Oh, yeah.

Whereas before you were able to, you know, kind of rinse, wash and repeat and set something up and have it be, be efficient. It is, it is only getting more and more complex by the day. A lot of questions for sure.

I mean, and that's part of the benefit, is that we have a team of people that go inside and understand all what happens behind the scenes there for all the rules and the regulations and they handle that. So you don't have to worry about that.

Sure. And that for, for an end user experience, that's probably the most vital way of making it an easy process. Right.

Because now all of a sudden, come June, summertime, EU is putting a lot of new regulations in place, new fees. One of the things we've been talking about A lot here today at Manifest.

And so having a solution like GlobalPost that simplifies it for the end user and satisfies all those regulatory requirements that in the end they're not going to understand as the end consumer of it, it's not really their concern. So having it be done easy is, is vital. And it's a great that that there's companies like GlobalPost out there who make that simple for them.

Absolutely.

I mean, and that's kind of what we've been born from is, you know, like I said in the beginning, you know, how do we demystify international, make it easy for people? And that's why we've been successful and why we continue to do what we do and why that we continue to see the. The volume grow.

So that's outstanding. Is there anything else about GlobalPost that you want the listeners to know about?

Yeah, I mean, the things I said there, I hope resonate with people.

I mean, because I think a lot of customers or a lot of partners or a lot of suppliers, when they're thinking about International, they get scared a little bit and they're like, it's the unknown. They're not sure what they're going to have to do. They're not sure how many rules or procedures they're going to have to follow.

But if you work with a company like GlobalPost, we take care of that for you. And so we solve those, those unknowns and make it easy. And then the, the benefit of it is it's a untapped market for a lot of people right now.

Because, I mean, if you're shipping only domestically, think about how much volume you're missing out.

Sure.

And that volume is what we can help you capitalize on and make it easy for you to go capitalize on that. So don't be scared. Just get, just give me a call and we'll help you out and we'll get sales.

That's one of the biggest kind of takeaways we've had from Manifest so far. This year is 25 was tough. We all know there was a lot of stuff that came flex. Very complex. Don't be afraid of it.

It is a beast, but it is a beast worth taming. Right.

So I think it's one of those things where the more that GlobalPost can get out there and put its product out and make it simple for the end user, it's only going to grow from there and it's not only going to benefit the most people possible. So, Brian, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate having you.

Yes, thank you. Brian, congratulations on your first.

Amanda.

No, thank you. I survived my first one.

You did, you did.

Thank you guys so much.

You guys were great. Appreciate it.

All right, thanks, everybody. We'll see you again soon. Thanks for joining us on the Outside the Box with Asendia USA Podcast.

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