** cheapest international shipping rates? **

[RBBrittain]

If you're wondering what the general shipping charges are for Spain to the U.S., Correos (the Spanish post office) has a website in English.

In reality, however, what websites assess for "shipping" varies wildly on many factors in addition to ordinary shipping costs (which can vary wildly by country and/or carrier):

• Carriers offer different discounts to various shippers.
• Websites, like mail order before them, usually build overhead into their "shipping" costs under terms like "handling", "processing", or (in the UK) "packing". Since that can include anything (even profit), that varies by retailer.
• Different websites use different shipping options. For example, while airmail is common from the UK to the States, Japanese e-tailers almost always use expedited shipping--either EMS (Express Mail) or FedEx, UPS, etc.--on all international orders.
• Location can matter even among different e-tailers in the same country. This is especially true in the UK, where for competitive reasons (see next item) many e-tailers are now based in the Channel Islands (Guernsey & Jersey) instead of the UK proper.
• In Europe, how the e-tailer handles value-added tax (VAT), their version of sales tax--which, unlike the U.S., is part of the advertised price--can impact shipping rates as well. (And for good reason; UK VAT is 17.5% of pre-tax price, much higher than most U.S. sales taxes.) For example, the reason many UK e-tailers moved to the Channel Islands is to avoid paying VAT on small-value items like CDs, DVDs, and in some cases BDs. They effectively use the VAT portion of the price to pay for free shipping to UK addresses; they may also use it to offset international shipping costs. (It's explicit with non-EU orders from Amazon's EU sites--they deduct VAT, then add shipping; some other sites do it implicitly.)