Pay $150 a year to a PO BOX at Australia Post Office and sellers wont post to a secure PO BOX ? JOKE

[bigblockfxstb]

Leaving a parcel in a open letter box at a block of flats its just stupid.

The Courier companies and service I have now found in Australia to be a joke and unreliable. I am no way going to not goto work , waiting for a courier to then NOT turn up as sheduled. they are unreliable and it does not work.

I now pay for a PO BOX at a actual AUSTRALIA POST OFFICE and most sellers in Australia now say NO PO BOX ? are you totally stupid. 

So now I spend time looking for sellers who send to the PO BOX or I simply have to goto Hong Kong and wait extra week or two because the sellers here... well done.

I HAVE A PO BOX - I PAY $$ FOR IT.

EBAY should have a LISTING FILTER option now that has DELIVER to POBOX ONLY as it will stop me wasting my time

Rob

[bushmagpie]

Occasionally I find this problem but I message the seller and they do send it to my po box. However the problem often arises with Australia Postst automatic system where our local po is not recognised on their system. So instead of getting it sent to Benalla West, where my po box is, as different to Benalla PO which is actually classed as Benalla East PO I just address it to the same PO box no in Benalla and it finds its way to Benalla West LPO. Stupid that they can't even recognise the location of one of their own LPO's on the system.

[davewil1964]

My understanding is that PO Box numbers aren't duplicated within a postcode. So if you have the correct postcode, your delivery will go to the correct PO Box.

[ytwo000]

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@kopenhagen5 wrote:

When I got a PO box it was $25.

It very quickly climbed and seems to be going up every year, now it's $110 for a small normal box.

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when i got a commodore it was $5,000..

It very quickly climbed and seems to be going up every year, now it's $40,000 plus .

[collect247]

Yes but the Commodore has changed everytime but the bloody PO BOX hasn't,still the same pissy little box.

Seriously chalk and cheese lol.

[davewil1964]

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@ytwo000 wrote:

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@kopenhagen5 wrote:

When I got a PO box it was $25.

It very quickly climbed and seems to be going up every year, now it's $110 for a small normal box.

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when i got a commodore it was $5,000..

It very quickly climbed and seems to be going up every year, now it's $40,000 plus .

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Actually it isn't. You can't buy a new one any more.

[collect247]

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@davewil1964 wrote:

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@ytwo000 wrote:

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@kopenhagen5 wrote:

When I got a PO box it was $25.

It very quickly climbed and seems to be going up every year, now it's $110 for a small normal box.

---

when i got a commodore it was $5,000..

It very quickly climbed and seems to be going up every year, now it's $40,000 plus .

---

Actually it isn't. You can't buy a new one any more.

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I agree with you on that one dave,it isn't a Commodore any more but a Eurodore lol.

[zanadoo_56]

I've never understood why sellers don't like PO Boxes.  I wondered if (seeing as eBay is American) there was some reason in the US that seems to have been carried over to Oz.

I have a friend who has used a PO box for years and finally the penny has dropped why I've realised she doesn't buy much on eBay. LOL

At one stage many years ago I considered getting a PO box.  Not because of mail theft but a spate of letterbox vandals who thought it was great fun to smash up as many of them in the street as they could manage before getting away..  Gosh, I might have saved a fortune, being unable to buy lots of stuff on eBay.  Ah well, the vandals moved on and I forgot all about it.

[lyndal1838]

There is a reason why US sellers do not like sending to PO Boxes and it does seem to carry over to Australia.

In the USA and to an extent in Canada post office boxes are equated with the roadside boxes in the country areas.   There is no security for them and they can be unattended for days at a time.  Other PO boxes in suburban areas are often not in an actual post office so are not really very secure either.

This not posting to PO boxes originated in the USA and sellers here got the idea that they were not safe here either despite the different circumstances.    I can understand sellers here not wanting to post to RMBs but they are quite different to PO boxes.0

[digital*ghost]

It isn't purely about the security of the package once delivered, it's also the fact that a seller doesn't get any actual verifiable information about the buyer, due to the layers of anonymity afforded by payment systems like PayPal, and information / data that suggests that PO box use has a higher rate of scams and fraud. A lot of people also think this is a US-centric statistc, but this article shows otherwise (it refers to a report on CC fraud, and among the report's recommendations was to not send to PO boxes). 

Many will say ID needs to be provided to open a PO box here, but that means nothing to a seller receiving information, and this article shows how easy it can be for scammers to use PO boxes to conduct various scams. 

The majority of PO box holders are obviously not scammers - I am a PO box holder, and I send to them without issue, but JMHO there's no grounds to label sellers who don't as paranoid, misinformed people who are making an unfathomable decision. (I'm not saying anyone has said that, it just feels like a common undercurrent of these threads a lot of the time). 

[brerrabbit585]

Something that hasn't really been addressed is that if a seller finds it much cheaper to use a courier, they may decide to eliminate PO boxes because of the extra cost involved in sending via AP.