Wow in the hole..

[zigartenzewel]

Dabled back into eBay. Sell a few items. (2?)

First one to US without a hitch, second to Spain.

Claims he didn't get it, I'm debited the item price plus shipping plus eBay fee. Who knows? some Spanish postal worker has it? It's sitting on his shelf ready to be resold? Karma?

Wow, Fool me once Ebay.

You know I sold some items on Kijiji, painless process, this method seems pointless for a casual seller. It's like they know they can scam you.

I'm thinking maybe tracking (prices me out of the market) and/or North America Europe and UK only? 

I dunno, super frustrating. 

Thanks for listening to my rant out.

[mr.elmwood]

Spain can take 3-5 weeks. How long has it been?

eBay is tough for casual sellers, I agree. There are way too many hoops to jump through.

Kijiji is a waste of time for me. Tracking is a huge waste of money. Depends what you are selling, but, yeah, start with Canada-USA first.

UK? Um? The UK is the single most complained about destination due to their Customs attaching VAT to the total of the widget price plus postage. Yeah, they tax the postage. Britons seem to be totally unaware of this.

You jumped in at the deep end of the shark tank. I suggest dipping yer toes in the kiddie pool first.

[aubreyclay56]

i only sell to us and canada,to easy to get scammed to other countries with out tracking,and to send something untracked to anywear with out tracking is risky buisness although i have been lucky a few times and get honest buyers,except i sent an item to new zealand and hve not got fb from that sale as of yet and its been over 3 wks,so im holding my breath on that one

[zigartenzewel]

It's been about 8 weeks. I see he/she had LOTS of buying and no selling history. I've been in eBay world before, just seems to have become more ugly now. Thanks for the input, I'll be back in but much more carefully.

[hlmacdon]

The majority of what I ship now is via USPS tracking. I've had experiences where foreign postal services (Spain included) did not leave a pickup slip for the buyer, and the item was returned as non-deliverable some time later. I've also had cases where I've literally had packages get stuck because they've fallen off a conveyor and not been retrieved until customer service was able to get them to go look. With tracking I get the benefit of being able to see the round trip, whereas with the untracked options you are left in the dark. 

While there are undoubtedly cases of scammers abusing this, there are also legitimate cases where items don't show up for reasons beyond the buyer/seller. One thing you can do is examine the feedback the buyer has left for others and see if there is a pattern of non-receipt related feedbacks, as negative feedback is sometimes a tool employed by the potential scammer to coerce the seller. Ultimately though, without tracking you are pretty much on the hook. The problem for the casual seller is you may only have one bad experience but given the smaller pool of sales percentage wise it sticks out. When I shipped via Canada Post untracked services I had a very minimal loss rate for packages but went through some periods of slow sales where I had an uneven distribution of lost parcels which was quite frustrating at the time.

[maximus7001]

Never had a problem with spain yet out of maybe 10 items over the years, all low risk low cost items like cassette tapes. I did notice that you are shipping to much higher risk countries that you SHOULD be worrying about instead. china, nigeria, somolia, singapore etc.,  really?? You should know better about about a dozen places you ship to.

How did you ship it? Did you send it surface?

[zigartenzewel]

It was surface yea. I do know I have to spend time on my "shipping to" list. It's been kinda buggin me so this is the catalyst to learn more. This wasn't really a big loss, First loss is your best loss!

[mr.elmwood]

Surface is is measured in months. Forget any time lines you see in weeks, surface is 2-3 months.

[zigartenzewel]

Boy do I feel like a schmo, buyer offered a 50/50 split. I thanked him for his generous gesture.

Gord slinks back to his hole in embarrassment,,,,

[mr.elmwood · Accepted solution]

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@zigartenzewel wrote:

Boy do I feel like a schmo, buyer offered a 50/50 split. I thanked him for his generous gesture.

Gord slinks back to his hole in embarrassment,,,,

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Why?

Hold your head up high. You have owned up to innocent errors.

I have always said: "One does not learn by getting it right, one learns by doing it wrong and learning how to do it right".

You learned some stuff.