I’m selling an item on ebay (I’m in the USA). I have a bidder in Ukraine who has sent me a message asking if I would be willing to ship USPS Priority Mail International to his country.
Calculating the postage is easy enough… but what about tracking? From everything I can see on USPS.com and elsewhere, it’s not possible to track Priority Mail International packages. So doesn’t this mean I’m setting myself up to be scammed? (“Sorry-- your package never arrived,” says the guy who just received my package on the other side of the globe.)
Is this too risky? Or am I being needlessly nervous? Or is there indeed a way to track delivery that I’m just overlooking?
(Sorry to bring this question here-- the ebay forums are a nightmare to search through.)
Others may disagree with me, but this would make me nervous and suspicious. Is your item so unusual and the market so limited that the only buyer you can find is in the Ukraine?
That wouldn’t prevent the buyer from claiming it didn’t arrive and filing a complaint with eBay. You might have your money, but you might lose your account.
When you sell stuff on Ebay you never quite know what will happen.
A couple of weeks ago I came home at about 7pm, just as it was getting dark. My house is in a quiet estate with no industry, so I was surprised to see a large six axle artic (semi) stopped in the access road with his flashers going.
I saw that he had LV for Latvia on his number plate and guessed he was lost. I stopped and soon discovered that he spoke no English at all but he had an address and telephone number on a grubby piece of paper.
I could see that the address was not right, so I phoned the number. The guy who answered sounded pretty pissed off - understandable since the driver had already rung him a couple of times and he did not speak Latvian. I soon established that the guy had sold a couple of canoes to someone who had told him he would collect and pay cash. He had no idea that the customer was in Latvia, or that he would send a monster truck to collect it.
It’s an Electro Harmonix guitar pedal. Not impossible to find overseas, I gather, but not as common as some other brands. And the final price for this used pedal, even with intl. shipping, is still likely to be close to half what the MSRP is for a new one.
The seller’s (6-year) history shows he/she buys and sells electronic musical equipment (vintage synths, analog drum machines, etc.). So if the buyer is a sock puppet, it’s a well-crafted one.
But still, I’m wary about the lack of tracking. Anyone know if I’m wrong on this count? Is it possible to track USPS Priority Intl.?
What gave you the idea that you can’t track USPS Priority International? From USPS, the third bullet point confirms tracking, except for the Flat Rate stuff.
Hmm. You’re right. I was looking at the flat rate (which is how I tend to ship everything domestically). I guess I can tell the buyer yes, if he/she is willing to pay the extra $ (it’s about $50 vs. $24 for the flat rate).
For what it’s worth: When I was selling to overseas buyers, all my ads contained the disclaimer that I was not responsible for items once they entered the delivery system. Insurance claims are the responsibility of the receiver, not the sender. If the buyer insists on using a method that does not have tracking, it’s on him.
Far as I know USPS tracking ends when your item enters the overseas postal service as there is just no way to connect Ukraine postal tracking to your item. Fedex, however, tracks it all the way to front door but costs considerably more.
However, it sounds like you have a legit buyer and his feedback rating is good so you probably don’t have anything to worry about. In similar ebay transactions I’ve never had a problem sending or receiving to and from foreign buyers/sellers. They’re regular folks who like to find deals on ebay like anyone else.
If the buyers accept that policy then great, but PayPal and/or the buyer’s credit card company may certainly differ. In my experience it’s the responsibility of the seller to get the product to the buyer.
Insurance might be an issue to Russia. If the item is valuable I wouldn’t send it without insurance because it can just disappear and you have no recourse. Filing an insurance claim can take many months but at least it should pay you back.
IME, the sender usually gets better cooperation from the shipper than the receiver. This is partly because the sender has better proof of shipment than the recipient (who probably has only a tracking number, if that); and also because the sender is who the shipper gets money from and has more impact on the amount of business that shipper sees (saying “I shipped a package with xyz delivery and it (was damaged or never arrived)” carries a lot more weight with a potential customer than “I received a package through xyz delivery and it (was damaged or never arrived))”
Exactly, the seller is the customer of the shipper, not the buyer. The only time I’ve ever had to involve a buyer in a shipper dispute is when the item arrived damaged or an empty box arrived. In that case the shipper wants the buyer to send photographs and attest to what happened.