buyer won't pay for tracking

[oldlincolnian]

I am a Canadian seller, TOP RATED, selling on Ebay.com. I sell fairly low cost items. Tracking costs out of Canada are outrageous, Insurance costs are insane. No buyer wants to pay several times the cost of the item to get it shipped. My listings are prefaced with a BIG RED  "READ THE ENTIRE LISTING!!" and state CLEARLY that because of this mail cost issue out of Canada I WILL ship using whatever service is most appropriate, affordable and available to their location, despite Ebay's insistence that I ship tracked, unless the bidder requests and pays the extra for tracking or tracked and insured service, but that by bidding the buyer gives up the right to make a claim against me for lost or damaged shipments. I quote a s/h cost appropriate for untracked and uninsured mail and I state that their bid is considered acceptance of this condition. However I have had a couple of items go AWOL recently and Ebay backs the buyer's claims againt me, despite my clearly worded listing. If I don't refund its a guaranteed negative, I lose my money, my mail costs, my item and I cannot leave a negative against disrespectful, maybe dishonest, buyer who did not keep to their side of the bargain.

I know I have the option of listing a $5 item  for $20 postage free or for $5 with $15 tracked postage, but we all know I won't have any customers.

What is really irritating me though is Ebay's indifference  to the plight of the sellers, who are doing their very best to avoid the escalation of costs, while Ebay is insisting on tracking to "protect yourself" (which really means protecting Ebay) and then taxing the seller on the postal costs charged, which we then require to add into the s/h costs or lose money.... and when I call Ebay about these issues they are trained to blab on about "the cost of doing business" and how "we have options" and refuse to remove the few small red and totally unjust blemishes from our otherwise stellar track records. I'd sell somewhere else if there was a vehicle to do it with..... this treatment of sellers is appalling

[femmefan1946]

White space is your friend. That rant is hard to read.

I gather you have had a couple of possibly unwarranted "Item Not Received " claims.  Since you were not using tracking, you lost the claims and are now out both product and payment.

Annoying.

But how often does this happen? Once in a hundred sales? Once in ten sales?

Let's think about how to reduce the number of Disputes and how to keep your sales numbers up, or at least stable.

First off, when you lose a Dispute, you get black marks against your selling record. This can mean loss of TRS discounts. Fortunately, your unhappy buyer (and remember the buyer may be right that he has not received the item) cannot leave feedback or trash your DSRs.

BUT- if you had refunded before the buyer had to go to Paypal for his refund, even if this requires some negotiation, you would be better off in terms of your seller record. And no worse off in terms of loss of product and money. You can even politely ask, with the refund, that the buyer refund the refund when the item arrives. In my experience this works about 50 % of the time.

Now. You don't need tracking. Tracking just tells you (and if necessary PP) that the item has in fact arrived. This is rarely useful. (One in 100 sales? One in 1000 sales?) You can spend a lot of money to prevent the loss of a little money.

Business is not about your emotional well-bing. It is about money and the bottom line.

You can offset possible losses with insurance. This could be postal insurance, automatically available with some services and upgradeable at a cost. Or it could be third party insurance, shipinsurance and Hugh Wood International are two companies that in different ways, will insure your parcels. Or you could self-insure by adding a small amount to every asking or shipping price to offset possible losses, based on your costs.

The idea with insurance is that, faced with a report of non-delivery, you refund the buyer (calm down ) and go to the insurer for repayment of the refund.

Paypal is not involved. There is no damaging report on your selling record. Your consoled buyer leaves positive feedback and good DSRs. You are not out of pocket.

And your calm is not damaged.

Now let's look at all that red boilerplate. And toss it out. Good customers will be turned off. Bad customers won't care. Mobile *phone customers won't be able to read it-- and there are more and more of those every day. Just lose it.

Since you have no open listings I can't see what your shipping page looks like. But you choose the shipping method and the buyer does not. In my opinion, there is no good reason to give the customer any choice on this. He will always choose the cheaper service, the one which does not include any protection for you as a seller.  And that is because he is protected not by tracking or insurance, but by the PP Buyer Protection Plan.

So keep it simple. Give the cost of shipping (I prefer Calculated usually) and stick to it, without explanation.

There are a couple of ploys that may help with complaints. If you are using PP shipping labels, give the customer the invoice number. This is reassuring. PP has already notified him that the label has been purchased, further reassurance.  Leave feedback immediately and include the shipping date in it. Consider moving to "Free" shipping, at least within Canada. This gives you automatic 5 star DSRs on shipping cost **and makes customers happy, even if they do realize that the cost of shipping has been included in the original asking price. And most don't ever realize that.

*BTW, your mobile phone customer can't see the description of the item. What he does see is large red letters telling him to read the whole listing. The rest is invisible.

** Even on US and overseas shipping cost.