Item Not Received Cases Opened by Buyer Far Too Quickly

[number60000]

This has been my greatest frustration with selling on ebay.  Buyers on the other side of the planet don't seem to realize or appreciate how long it takes items to reach them when they choose to pay for surface mail. 

Now I'm thinking that ebay has some automatic function that warns the buyer that they are close to the point when they can not open an item not received case.  

I've complained time and again to ebay that surface mail, especially from Canada, to Europe, Australia, Asia, South America can take up to eight months.  Naturally they don't seem to care.

I have put up warnings to overseas bidders about the length of time it will take, on my auctions.  On items that sell high, I send messages to the winner before I ship the item about the length of time and beg them to be patient if they choose surface mail.

Now I can't even claim insurance on these parcels due to yet another Canada Post policy that screws us.

I have no choice but not to allow surface mail options to my international buyers.  I expect to loose a lot of sales, as someone pointed out, Canada Post rates are ridiculously high!!!

Thank you ebay.  I'm so close to closing up my ebay store...

[Anonymous]

To recped, Are you saying that he is not using the approriate shipping method, like he should ship by XpressPost?  Lots of buyers are NOT willing to pay for XpressPost regardless of what.  So what is the real solultion? In fact I see nothing expect that eBay needs to change from 45 days to 90 days!  Canada Post even tell us 90 days before we can file for a claim for International mail!!

[toff3]

Pierre writes:

Nobody is "forced" to offer or use surface.

It may not by [sic]  the choice of others who may prefer to charge more and offer "air" or, for low cost/high shipping items, simply refuse to sell overseas

I've already explained why I'm forced to offer surface mail overseas.

Who am I to force my customers to pay Canada Post's outlandish air postage rates just because some eBayers don't understand the implications of using international surface mail (which is a lousy service globally)?

I think it's presumptuous for any eBay seller to decide that a particular sale is not worth having just because there's a chance that the buyer will give him grief over a delivery delay. We've already established how this problem can be easily resolved between buyer and seller without any involvement by eBay/PayPal.

Bottom line: the only reason we're having this debate is that Canada Post is too inefficient and/or incompetent to provide Canadians with an acceptable, reasonably-priced international mail service.

Tom