USA Buyers only?

[brentsg]

Summary: There is more risk, less control of the transaction, and it's a pita.

If you don't have to do it and you don't know the buyer, then why do it?

I ship USPS in the USA and if some asshole screws me then I open a mail fraud case. It works..

[gct]

hoof it over to the post office for a quote

Is this some sort of metric/imperial thing?

A ruler and a scale can be got for about £3 posted from China.

Nah, I'm going be be a lazy ass and just not bother. Even if a buyer is willing to pay me $60 or whatever in full to ship an item, I don't like giving Canada Post that much money for a service that costs a fraction of that amount elsewhere. Maybe that's why they're in the red? :p

This goes off topic but it makes me wonder how Chinese vendors can sell me a $7 item and ship it to me for free with tracking (using CP's labour once it arrives in my country, but that's beside the point) and still make a profit. If I pick up the package at the postal office, don't open it, but just post it right back to the originating address it will probably cost me $20 in postage alone.

Shipping to USA from Canada is not terrible, but in certain cases I have saved money by driving across the border into USA and making a domestic shipment and I'm just floored by how cheap it is, I can mail a box across USA for less than what it would cost me to ship a CD to my next-door neighbour if I wanted to. Then there's the bonus of having a chance to buy cheap groceries and gas, but it does take time out of a weekend to do.

[GaijinPunch]

Which is just ridiculous...there is no reason to hate on any Canuck. We're so benign,

Even your protests are nice.

I know it's Photoshop, but still funny as shit.

Educated people will understand that it takes money to ship things. Many people don't understand this. Maybe not at the forums, but there's certainly people out there on eBay and the like who don't understand this.

You sound like my ex wife. When I was shipping PCB after PCB after PCB she always asked if I still made money after the shipping. I told her a million fucking times, "the buyer pays me for whatever the shipping costs are on top of the item". If you want to pretend it's monopoly money until the buyer is happy that's fine and dandy, but assuming the deal finishes satisfactorily (and let's face it, the majority of them do or nobody would sell on line) then it's no skin off the seller's back.

[opt2not]

Which is just ridiculous...there is no reason to hate on any Canuck. We're so benign,

Even your protests are nice.

I know it's Photoshop, but still funny as shit.

Hah! I like it.

But you gotta say it like a Canuck and pronounce the OR like "sORE-y". Not the American way, where it sounds like "sarwy"... or *gun shots*.

[Limbrooke]

Most eBay sellers will ship internationally once I ask them as I have 100% positive feedback and lots of it.

Yeah, I mainly browsed ebay.com as there is better supply and as a result lower prices. For years I've always asked those who don't have shipping options outside the US. There are 3 outcomes: "no", "yes" but the shipping is sky high, and "yes" and the shipping is reasonable. Given that 90% of what I buy I cannot find locally, this is really the only action unless you want to pay a lot extra in money and time.

I have the rationale most Americans don't ship/offer to ship outside the US is as already stated: it's a hassle and why bother when it's going to sell for nearly the same price anyway. There's almost no benefit and when customs gets involved it's more complicated with no apparent gain. Incidently, I don't like the Global Shipping Program as the pre-set costs and included customs fees are absurdly high so despite this making things easier has cranked up the cost significantly for foreign bidders.

[system11]

The ebay international shipping thing is also a scam - charges on top of inflated customs charges, and in the small print any items they can't deliver, they're entitled to keep. Now bear in mind that they use the cheapest shittiest local couriers in some cases (Yodel in the UK for example) and you have a mess waiting to happen.

Yodel are infamous for failing to deliver, failing to leave a card, throwing stuff over fences etc. There are some US sellers on ebay I used to regularly use, and now I don't.

[greg]

About 7 years ago, I was selling stuff on eBay for my Grandparents' estate. They were hoarders, with cardboard boxes piled up to the ceiling. Walking through their front door, you have to side step sideways between a narrow gap between boxes. There were also 20+ cats in the house, and they could navigate to places people couldn't get to in order to piss, shit, and even die. That house was DISGUSTING. I never got anything good for Christmas from them growing up; my gifts were always the cheapy discount store type of crap. When they died, my parents went through their catshit-infested house and found a goldmine of TOTALLY AWESOME TOYS I never got. Mego figures from Planet of the Apes, Marvel superheroes, and Star Trek; mint-on-card Star Wars and various other action figures; MIB G1 Transformers, etc.

Well since I was the token nerd in the family, I was selected to list auctions on eBay with my expertise and kept a percentage of the profit. I sold one Masters of the Universe Prince Adam figure for $80 to some jerkwad in France. I sent it via regular airmail. A couple weeks later, he asked me if I had sent it yet. I told him yes. Then suddenly he could no longer communicate in English, and he lodged a complaint through PayPal. I provided a copy of the receipt from the post office as well as a copy of the customs form I had procured from the post office I'd mailed it from. Nope, that wasn't good enough. It wasn't a PayPal-verified address. Also, I shipped the figure for about $8 via airmail instead of $20+ via EMS. I even talked with a PayPal rep over the phone. I asked if even I had sent it via EMS, as long as it wasn't a PayPal-verified address, he could still lodge a complaint and I'd be out of luck. He dodged the question. So I gathered that even if I had sent it via EMS, that douchepickle could have exploited a loophole in the system. I am certain that he received the item. He was communicating in proper English and then suddenly he refused to use anything but French. In the end, he got a free, MOC MOTU action figure that was worth at least $80.

So TL;DR: eBay favors buyers, and screw sellers. Not only is it becoming increasingly expensive to list items these days and rip you off twice with both eBay fees and PayPal fees, but they do not protect sellers from frauds. So, I will only sell to countries that have verified addresses. It isn't laziness. You just get sick of getting ripped off by dishonest jerks after a while. Those eBayers who sell only to US addresses have likely been burned in the past. The last time I sold something on eBay, some dude in Italy asked if I could ship it to him in Italy. I told him that if the Italian post office wasn't run by thugs, I would consider it. He told me he couldn't argue with that.

[GaijinPunch]

Many foreign countries have verified address systems w/ PP. That's not the issue here.

Sounds like you had fun going through the cat house though!

[cools]

The comment above about a French buyer rings bells. In all the years I've been shipping and buying internationally, France is the only country with an 80% failure rate for items arriving damaged: sent or received. A couple of packages from other places, but such a high rate there it makes me very reluctant to deal with anyone in France.

I've never had a successful damaged item claim even with paying for insurance. Its put on more for luck than anything else.

[Xyga]

That's because the French Post is a dying institution, their quality of service has been decreasing constantly over the years.
Pick UPS, FedEx or DHL if you're shipping something fragile/valuable over there.

[Ed Oscuro]

douchepickle

Please let this guy be in the bad traders list.