Actually, that was pretty fast, surface mail can take 3 months.  Glad it arrived in good order 🙂

The seller is foolish, at best.

The average buyer would have opened an INR case way before now and been refunded. The seller would then be relying on the honesty of the buyer to repay.

in the days of sailing ships there were several ships leaving the UK every week for australia,  today, you items get put into containers, and then wait and wait and wait until a ship leaves bound for Aust. (not many cargo vessels do... ) ... so 3, 4 or more months for seamail is not unusual

I very much doubt that anyone here would even consider using surface post...you have no paypal protection at all.

And the time your item took is excellent for surface....it is usually much longer

The seller is foolish, at best.   The average buyer would have opened an INR case way before now and been refunded. The seller would then be relying on the honesty of the buyer to repay.

Maybe... but also the buyer should have known that surface mail can take much longer, possibly falling out of the PayPal dispute timeframe. It's a tough one to answer, really. Good that it worked out.

Maybe... but also the buyer should have known that surface mail can take much longer, possibly falling out of the PayPal dispute timeframe. It's a tough one to answer, really. Good that it worked out.

Easy answer. If the seller is foolish enough to offer seamail, the seller gets an INR and relies on the buyer to repay them when they receive it.

Not a business model I subscribe to. Mind you I only sell to Australia, for good reason.

That's not too bad.  I had a seller underquote on postage so she decided not to contact me first but send my purchase by sea instead.  I was amazed when it turned up - it had been so long I'd forgotten all about it. 🙂

Plus....I remember in the 1960s when I used to buy a comic from the UK - 6 months or more was the norm between when it was published in the UK and when it arrived in Oz. 😮