I use Cookie Jar Insurance.
Which is basically self-insurance, adding a few pennies to my asking price as a premium against very rare instances of items lost in the mail or damaged in transit.
The postal systems of the world are very very good at what they do. We hear of problems for the same reason we hear "man bites dog" stories.
- Most Undelivered disputes will be late deliveries. If you use use tracking (or even if you don't) you can rebill the buyer after the refunded item is shown as delivered.
- Some undelivered items and Undeliverable and will eventually return to you. Eventually.
- Much of the damage in transit is from poor packaging. Which is the responsibility of the seller not the shipping service.
At an eBay seminar some decades ago, a Canada Post officer explained that on the conveyor belts in postal terminals a package could drop up to two feet from one belt to the next then have another parcel weighing up to 50 pounds drop on it.
Package for that.
If you have to refund and the item is not worth having returned*, you use all those pennies in your Cookie Jar Insurance to cover the loss.
Most eBay sellers report less than a 1% loss to claims of any sort. If yours are higher, it might be worth asking for a critique ** of your current practices.
Why give money to a third party insurer for something that is unlikely to happen and even less likely to cause a loss?***
*Remember that you can always demand the return, but you may have to pay for the postage.
** Critiques are not criticism. They are suggestions for improvement.
*** Why spend $100 a year to prevent a $5 loss?
