Turns out the British had cleverly outsourced to a service in India who had entered every single piece of data from the transfer into the wrong field on the transfer screen. The Americans, in a similar transfer, managed to leave off one of the numbers in the routing number, so the money bounced around in the system before being returned to my account for a do-over weeks later. Nobody, of course, pays for any lost business while your money is in the ether. But they never forget to charge incoming and outgoing fees and give you a poor exchange rate to boot.

Time delays present a further problem. A recent customer wanted to pay for an expensive set of books with a bank draft that would take her a couple of weeks to send to us. It proved to be near-impossible to get the Australian bookseller who had the books to agree on a price in US$. With narrow margins, both of us were worried that we would lose our shirts if the exchange went the wrong way by the time the funds were received from our customer and wired in Australian dollars to the vendor.

A few weeks ago, feeling like the entire process was out of our control, and that we were at the complete mercy of third-party websites, credit card companies, and expensive and sloppy financial institutions, we decided to learn more about the process of receiving and sending funds overseas.

In a sort of epiphany (I was, I admit, a Joycean scholar), I realized that the problem was not buying and selling books overseas, but the difficulty and cost of sending and receiving funds in different currencies. The institutions we were using to send and exchange currency were getting in our way and costing our company a lot of time and money. What we needed was more control over this hidden but critical process.

Once we identified the real problem, we found a better way to handle each transaction. We discovered a service that would instantly tell us the cost of sending or receiving money, enable us to receive the best exchange rates, and minimize or eliminate the extra charges that we've been paying. We could handle delayed but certain sales, because we could lock in exchange rates to guarantee our profits.