You will probably find that it is cheaper to ship lettermail and refund item not received claims than it is to charge shipping and not refund claims.
Let's say the difference between tracked an untracked is $10 per order.
You list 100 cards, all with a market value of $30 per card:
-You can list them for $28+$2 shipping, you pocket $28 but have to refund INR claims.
-You can list them for $18+$12 shipping, you do not need to refund INR claims, but this costs you $10 of profit per order.
-You cannot list them for $30+$12 shipping, because that would be $42 total. People are unlikely to pay $42 for a $30 card.
All 100 cards sell:
-With lettermail, you make $2800.
-With tracking, you make $1800. That is $1000 less.
-You effectively paid a $1000 insurance fee to protect yourself from INR claims. At $30 a card, you would need to lose more than 33 out of 100 packages for that to make sense.
-Even in a high risk category, you almost certainly won't lose 33 percent of your packages.
-You can run these numbers for all different price points.
A few notes:
-You might choose to pay for tracking on a case by case basis. Does someone have a lot of feedback indicating items haven't arrived? Maybe you cancel the order or bite the bullet and pay for tracking.
-Maybe you pay for tracking on more expensive orders only. It is a lot easier to justify spending $10 for tracking on a $100 order than it is to spend $10 tracking on a $30 order.
It will vary from category to category, but most INR claims come from lack of communication or incorrect shipping times. If you are going to ship lettermail, you should make sure your shipping service is the generic "economy" shipping service that gives you about 18 business days. This is more accurate for a worst case scenario with lettermail. It means a buyer cannot open an INR until 18 business days goes by. Their package will probably be there by then. You also should message buyers when an item ships to let them know that you did in fact hand it off to Canada Post, and to let them know how long it might take for their item to arrive.
You can block buyers who abuse INRs. You can also report them to eBay. eBay does take action against buyers who abuse INRs. They don't always boot them off the site, but I have seen some serial INR buyers have all their negatives left for others removed, and I assume have their money back guarantee privileges revoked.
But you also have to consider there will be lots of genuine INR claims. In which case, if you are polite and provide good customer service, buyers will usually approach you to re-pay for an item if it arrives after an INR case is refunded. So it is important to not assume every INR case is a scammer. While extremely rare, I had a lettermail order within the province between two major cities take 40 or so days. That sort of thing does happen.
