Errors On Ebay

Paypal is a must. Follow the rules and use express post with signature. It works fine. Try to cut corners, get burned.

The whole issue of shipping on ebay is tricky. If you don't use tracked shipping and the buyer claims he did not get the coin, then the seller is out of luck and has to refund. An unscrupulous buyer can easily defraud a seller.

However, tracked shipping is quite expensive, regular post is highly reliable and the vast majority of buyers are honest.

I think that most bidders look at the all-in cost of a purchase. So if you charge say $12 for tracked shipping, this will in effect be taken off the winning bid price. As I look at it, the seller is really paying for the shipping out of his sale price, not the buyer.

For me then, the question comes down to the risk of loss. I think that the risk of loss is well under 1% and it essentially zero with high feedback North American customers. So I tend to send all items by regular mail unless the value is quite large. A $100 loss would hurt but it won't kill me. So I would rather take the chance on regular mail rather than pay, incrementally, $10 more in Canada (or more like $20 for the US). I think my risk of loss is well under 10% to 20%.

It hurts when something goes astray, but I look at it as a cost of ebay.

BTW, while it always makes me nervous, I have probably now shipped about 25 to 50 items to Russia, Ukriane and a few other European countries of concern and I have had zero losses. I have had no losses to China, Hong Kong or Malaysia on a similar number of items.

I was defrauded on a couple of small items out of India, but I have also had about 10 things make it to India safely (including about $250 of Newfie silver, which post-auction the buyer agreed to pay up an extra $15 for registration.)

Shipping is not the issue - have shipped many coins with out a problem . The whole paypal thing is the problem , I use to sell the odd coin on ebay before but when they made paypal mandatory , I stopped . Buying with paypal is ok because you only have to use your credit card but when selling you have to give your banking info - that is the problem . I have no problem accepting cheques and money orders and this should be fine but ebay owns paypal and they have to extract more fees from people . Should be illegal on what they do .

I have a bank account only for paypal. I don't keep too much money in it, only what I need.

@errorone2012,

I first joined ebay in june 1997 when ebay was a excellent site. Sometime around 2004 I opened a ebay coin store that required paypal payments only...
Long story short, in April 2006 both my ebay and paypal accounts were hacked into, including locking me out of my account. My only way to contact them was via telephone, and that's when I was advised the hackers had used my credit cards and also accessed my personal bank account... After a 30 day account freeze, I was done with them because paypal REQUIRES a bank account number on file and I will never enter that information again anywhere on the internet...

https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/m...fication-faq

PayPal does NOT require that you link an account, they only suggest that you do so to make buyers more comfortable with their purchase.

From 1997 to the time I set up the ebay store, I had exceeded the $10,000 limit and paypal needed my bank account info to transfer funds and pay their fees...
This was close to seven years ago and I have not paid any attention since then on both ebay and paypal's changes.
[I know what I experienced and will never trust their sites again]