[glchen]

I received my winnings my Christies yesterday. Just thought it'd be interesting to how where my $179 shipping cost for a single ~7x9" photo went. The $179 shipping was broken down into $144 for courier cost and $35 for insurance. My photo before BP was $1000, and the BP was $250, so the BP + shipping was $429, which basically added 43% to the hammer price of my winnings, which is the highest I've ever seen.

I paid via credit card 8 days ago (a nice feature of Christies where you can charge your CC up to $50K), and my card was charged 3 days later. As you can see from the first photo, the package was shipped two days ago via FedEx Priority Overnight, and I received it yesterday.

As you can see from the pictures, the packaging was done extremely well, obviously, the best I've ever received for a single photo. The cardboard was very thick, and you can see that Christie's is used to shipping very expensive flat items. Obviously, my photo arrived in perfectly good shape, and I'm very happy with the packaging. However, I still would have preferred the trade-off for the shipping cost being much cheaper, and being done using ground shipping as most of the other auction house do it. Still an interesting experience.