I would have had a subscription or two for the past few of years (APs for sure) if not for the international shipping rates. It has come to my attention through boards (such as reddit) that there are several people like me in both Canada and Australia.
Are there any intentions to open international offices in order to provide content to those in other countries without the crazy shipping fees?
Otherwise the profits end up going to the discount distributors and not into the pockets of the business we would like to support. With a local office to distribute yourselves, the profits could go to where they ought to be. Heck, I'm only a few years from retiring and would even assist in such an endeavor!
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Paizo's a pretty small company, right now with the developers, designers, art team, editors, organized play, administrative, customer support, sales, web and software team, ordering, and warehouse workers, they are still at only around 75 employees (based on Erik's speech as the paizocon banquet). Considering their models include a lot of in person meetings and walking form one office to another to ask things, really the only jobs that could move away from home base would be Warehouse and customer service, and I'm not sure overseas shipping costs going down would raise shipments enough to justify this. It would also require a major overhaul of the backend software where they calculate shipping price to check from both locations, and make sure inventory and ordering is going to the correct warehouse.
In the past (during the magazine days) they had partnered with companies that act as a redistribution point for these type of things, but it ended up eating up more profits, and had more missing magazines that they replaced for free than doing it this way.
That's too bad. Thank you for the info!