I have experience with shipping stuff across the pond, and my guess is that Zaino doesn't want deal with the headache of shipping small quantities across the oceans. We're just shipping reports, which is fairly simple by itself, but an unfortunate number of them get lost or damaged, and then we have to re-ship...it takes extra time, we lose money on the deal, and the customer's angry because of the problems. Imagine how many bottles of Zaino have probably been damaged in shipping, or lost, or held-up in customs, or whatever...
So, we offer to ship our reports via Express Delivery (FedEx/UPS/Airborne), but the $44 charge (for a 10oz report) upsets many people, and they become mad (seriously - we get all sorts of wonderful letters about our Express fees) because of the expense for using "trackable" shipping options....
My guess is that Zaino ships pallets of product to European distributors and then let's them handle foreign orders. People in other countries often forget that there's a rather significant cost to ship large items across the sea. Then there are the exchange rates, duty fees, paperwork and more headaches - that's probably why the cost is so much higher for the German Zaino.
As the old saying goes, you can choose two of the following: low price, high quality or speed. In the case of shipping things across the ocean, low price isn't much of an option because there's no accountability for the item once it's left your door, so....
** I'll qualify all of this with a "I know people receive foreign orders via mail without any problems" but...if as a manufacturer you get burned enough by problems, it's usually a wise business move to develop an alternative, which in Zaino's case appears to involve a foreign distributor. In our case, we just continue to take it between the eyes.
