International Sales and Refunds - I quit.

[lupercal]

I really tried to find a solution to this.

These days I mostly sell CDs, and a lot of them go overseas. They go at large letter rate for about $9, and there is no tracking available with that service: you have to use parcel rates. And too often they apparently don't arrive, and the buyer opens a case against me, and I just refund everything and try to be philosophical and  put it down to 'breakage'.

But I had a $85 CD allegedly not arrive recently, which I shrugged and refunded. So I started putting a line in all my auctions pointing out that tracking would cost extra, and to ask me for a quote if it were desired.  Ebay thought this was a good idea, and encouraged me to do it.  And a guy in Sweden bought a CD, and I sent him this message:

    "As I mentioned in the description, there is no tracking available on international CDs at this postage rate. I'm ok with that, provided you agree I'm not responsible if it goes missing after posting. I can arrange tracking, but it adds about $15 to the postage - I'd need to check. You probably won't want it, but I make a point of offering."

And he said "it's ok", with a smiley emoticon - go ahead without the tracking.

And now he's opened a case against me, and I've had to refund it all anyway.

Meanwhile I have a $75 CD sitting here waiting to go to Colorado, and I just made the same offer to the buyer, and he declined the tracking and said to go ahead without it. And  to hell with it - I'm going to pay the extra money for parcel rate and tracking myself, because I'm not eating another $85 on this one. 

Most of my CD's I only make a few bucks on. This happens, and I have to sell a dozen more to recoup the 'breakage'.   I'll have to sell another few cheap ones to cover the out of pocket tracking on this one.

I could make tracking mandatory, but from memory that ends up being about $23 depending on destination - add another $2 to cover the commission on the extra postage - and nobody is going to buy a $8 CD with $25 postage.

I've established that  making it optional is futile.

So I'm not actually asking for advice. I'm just registering the fact that I quit. To hell with it. No more overseas sales on CDs without tracking. Which means no more overseas sales, since nobody would be willing to pay that much.  I've tried to be as up-front with people about this as I can, but clearly a written agreement not to hold me responsible ends up counting for nothing, even when Ebay told me it was a great idea.

I don't need you to say anything; I'm just writing this as an alternative to banging my head against the wall

[countessalmirena]

@lupercal,

I think it may matter... because while AP is a familiar acronym for AusPost/Australia Post, I've never heard or seen OP used as an acronym for it. Contextually it would hinder communication as I suspect most people would not recognise what you mean.

For instance, I genuinely wondered for some moments why you wanted the opening poster to refund you when you wrote ❝I don't mind refunding the buyer if OP refunds me❞... and the mystery only deepened as I reminded myself that you were the opening poster! (On these boards, OP is a well-recognised acronym for "opening poster" or "opening post".)

I also had at least a few moments wondering if there was a new courier/delivery company called Ozpost, when reading your comment ❝I think OzPost cover insurance❞. I suppose it would be a rather cheeky venture...

If there's an established acronym for something, in the interests of facilitating communication I think it's best to stick to the established acronym; ditto for the shortening of Auspost for Australia Post, as opposed to OzPost which - although it sounds the same as AusPost - does look just sufficiently different to throw the average person, even if it's just for a few seconds.

Weirdly, there actually is a company / website for ozpost ٜ 𝓒𝓞𝓜 ٜ 🇦🇺 - for people who never want to dig a hole again. (That brought a smile to my face: to slightly reword a phrase, "posts ain't posts".)

[springyzone]

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@i-once-was-bump wrote:

I don't understand your problem.

No one is going to give a seller money they don't have to so asking buyers if they want to pay more after they have bought something is no going to work.

If the item is rare or hard to come by then put  the cost of tracking in the price of the cd and offer free postage.

You will have insurance with AP if the item get lost.

---

I think Bump has hit on the crux of the problem.

Why would a buyer these days pay extra for postage when a lot of them realise that if anything gets lost, the seller will have to wear it if they haven't provided tracking?

I recently bought a relatively inexpensive item that had a disclaimer in the body of the ad that no responsibility would be taken for items that went missing if the buyer had not elected to pay extra for tracking. To be quite frank, it put my back up as that is false PLUS, when a person buys, the default postage amount comes up & it is easy to just pay on the spot, whereas having to ask a seller to change it would be an extra chore. A person might do it for express post but that's about all.

As it was, my little item arrived express post anyway. The seller may have paid extra to cover herself. I don't care. I paid the postage specified in the ad.

Back in the early 2000s when we sold, we offered insured postage I think it was, for about an extra $2.80. In thousands of sales, only one buyer ever took us up on it, even though in those days if something went missing it would have been their loss. People look at the total in the ad & that's what they want to pay, no extra if they can help it.

So my advice, for what it's worth, is build the cost of tracked postage into your total item cost, so that you still come out with some profit plus you are covered. If overseas sales are causing you too much grief, then limit to Australia.

[brerrabbit585]

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@i-once-was-bump wrote:

I don't understand your problem.

No one is going to give a seller money they don't have to so asking buyers if they want to pay more after they have bought something is no going to work.

If the item is rare or hard to come by then put  the cost of tracking in the price of the cd and offer free postage.

You will have insurance with AP if the item get lost.

If anyone claims they have not received their item tell them you need a signed affidavit for Auspost and that it is a legal document and signing a false affidavit is a crime.

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Good luck with that one.  If there's no record of it being delivered ebay will refund the buyer and there's nothing the seller can do.  By all accounts it's not easy to get a refund from AP either.

When I looked at selling overseas there didn't seem to be any way to really cover myself.  It seemed to be tracking OR a signature, not both.  I once sent a $100 item to the UK and paid the extra to get a confirmation when the item had been delivered but I never got any confirmation, yet the buyer received her item and told me how happy she was. 

Lots of things get delivered without being scanned so you can't rely on it being done at delivery.  This is where overseas selling becomes even more risky (for some items more than others).

[onekiwi0]

some useless info for you, I sent sheet music to sweden in a registered post evelope... paid $27.50? from memory for it - well they did.

Still I got a message saying the tracking shows its not been sent.  I had the receipt etc when it was

seems often they don't get scanned in, when arrive in the country.

we could see it had attempted delivery.

  I screen shot that and suggested they go into their local PO.

a little later...........several days to a week they said the post office had misplaced it /lost it/etc.

my point - maybe sweden mail service is not so good.  

I remember thinking thatnk goodness I had proof / docs that it had been sent etc, as I could feel a dispute coming on.

I do feel your pain, everytime I make an international sale, I am happy for the sale, but also apprehensive as I have had people open disputes and if you have no tracking you're a bit of a sitting duck..  now I add extra cover into the post price.

[designers*n*more]

Adding tracking to your item benefits YOU as the seller because we all know, without tracking your asking for a dispute for item not received. A buyer as you said isn’t going to pay extra for tracking in most cases, because if they don’t get their item, they’re going to get their money back and they know it  It’s unfortunate that there are greedy, dishonest buyers out there (not all of them but there are plenty who if you give them the chance of a “freebie” they’ll take it). 

[purplemon18]

Ok, I have to give my full opinion here, because it's certainly possible to reliably ship stuff international, I just sent another 12 items this morning.

Admittedly, when I first started I had several problems, so it was a bit of trial and error finding methods that worked for me.

In a nutshell, overseas sales have a separate postage option to domestic sales. My domestic sales are all "free" shipping. Which means that I have already built a certain ammount of postage into my prices. So I just subtract my local shipping cost from the international cost and charge the buyer the difference.

For example, if an item's shipping costs $5 domestic and $15 international, then I charge international buyers $10. With exchange rates, enough buyers find the price reasonable and I make more sales.

To solve some other problems, I offer untracked international shipping to only the most reliable destinations (NZ, EU, North America, Japan). Everybody else only gets an option for tracked shipping. I don't get many orders for the rest of the world, but I did send something to Thailand this morning. I don't ship at all to Russia, but that's only because ebay has a bug where Russians get offered both the "rest of the world" rate and the EU rate when they should only get the "rest of the world" rate.

Another piece of the puzzle that solves many problems is that ebay added a delivery option that says something like 20 to 35 business days. That way, I don't get any non-delivery cases after week 3, even though most of my items arrive in 2-3 weeks.

The final piece of the puzzle is that I use DHL eCommerce. Even for un-tracked items, the labels I print for DHL look very official, with CN22 forms and everything. I suspect that some buyers look at these labels and assume they will not get away with claiming non-delivery. The biggest drawback here is that, while DHL's rates are cheaper, they have a $10 (plus gst) pickup fee for small volume sellers, so you need to do enough international sales in a few days to spead the pickup cost out among them. I normally do 2 pickups per week, but on quiet weeks I have done just one and had no issues due to my 35 day delivery window.

The above method will be harder if you want to send everything tracked, but the occasional extra sale might be worth the trouble.

[celadon_city_dept]

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@onekiwi0 wrote:

some useless info for you, I sent sheet music to sweden in a registered post evelope... paid $27.50? from memory for it - well they did.

Still I got a message saying the tracking shows its not been sent.  I had the receipt etc when it was

seems often they don't get scanned in, when arrive in the country.

we could see it had attempted delivery.

  I screen shot that and suggested they go into their local PO.

a little later...........several days to a week they said the post office had misplaced it /lost it/etc.

my point - maybe sweden mail service is not so good.  

I remember thinking thatnk goodness I had proof / docs that it had been sent etc, as I could feel a dispute coming on.

I do feel your pain, everytime I make an international sale, I am happy for the sale, but also apprehensive as I have had people open disputes and if you have no tracking you're a bit of a sitting duck..  now I add extra cover into the post price.

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Australia Post's Regiistered Post International service has a tracking number BUT NO ACTUAL TRACKING EVENTS.

Which means there are no scan events if you look up the tracking number.

What it does have is Signature on Delivery, which, because there is no tracking, is not visible unless you open a lost mail investigation and AusPost contacts the delivery Postal Service to request it.

I stopped using Registered Post International a while ago because unscrupulous ppl would open up INR cases (which they lost after I showed them the signature they signed for - courtesy of Auspost after opening a missing item case with Auspost), and just changed to Standard International Parcel, which costs more but has tracking and optional signature on delivery. Sure, it's bad for international sales if postage costs more, so you have to decide for yourself how much protection you're willing to spend on for international shipments.