Quote:
Originally Posted by samosa4u
Anyhow, I've said it many times before that USPS First Class Mail is the way to go. The parcels get handed over to Canada Post and you can even track it on the Canada Post website using the same USPS tracking number.
And yes, if you are an American seller, you can opt out of the GSP. I've had many guys do this and ship to me directly themselves - zero problems so far.
Happy holidays
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This is true for Canada, as well as most other major countries as far as being able to track the package all the way through to delivery. When GSP was introduced, the inability to show a "Delivered" scan on the tracking for international shipments to dispute "item not received" claims was the big stick being used to coerce sellers into using the program. If you can't enter a tracking number online and have it come up with a result of "Delivered," the seller will lose the dispute every time. Once upon a time, USPS tracking only followed a package to the international airport it flew out of, and then showed no further updates due to the disconnect between the USPS system and the systems of the international mail carriers. Nowadays though, USPS has arrangements, similar to the one with Canada Post quoted above, with the mail carriers in most (perhaps all?) countries that I ship to, and I can think of only 1 instance in the last couple of years where an international shipment truly went missing so that I wound up refunding it. That's 1 in hundreds of international shipments (because I deal with a lot of entertainment photos, about 15-20% of what I sell goes overseas), which is comparable to the loss rate on domestic shipments. It is worth noting that about the time the international tracking went into effect, the rates jumped drastically as well, so that there are no "cheap" international shipping options any longer. No doubt that has led to some of the unpaid items I have had when international buyers did not check the shipping price before bidding, but again, the rate of unpaid items is no more than on my domestic sales. In general, I have not found international buyers to be any more likely to be fraudulent than domestic buyers.
I have a number of repeat customers overseas who I feel certain would have been one-and-done buyers, or never bought in the first place, had I used GSP to deliver their purchases. I know some sellers are scared to ship internationally, but I find that the process is identical for me to pack, print labels (using stamps.com), and ship a package myself to Norway as it is to Nashville. Add in that the loss rates have proven to be no worse than domestic shipments, and I now have the same tracking ability to back "item not received" disputes as I have with domestic shipments, and there is zero incentive for me to enter into a program where I have no ability to set reasonable charges or predictable delivery times for my buyers.