Why The USA Post Office Prices Are So Expensive?

Hi every body,have a question,why the us post office is so expensive? 30$ for a letter with a tracking number to France? awful,i have a problem with a client, I did not state that the stamp had no gum, big mistake,so my customer wanted to send back but hi wants me to paid for the return witch is impossible,Ebay does not allow us from France to buy a return bill,so my question is why,are they trying to make the usa postal service privet?????Thanks for any replay

Unless it's vey valuable, can't you ask him to send it via standard international mail, and pay him the postage cost upfront via Paypal?

I don't know where the $30 is coming from.

https://www.usps.com/international/...national.htm

rogdcam, he said with tracking. 1st class international letters do not get tracking. For it to be a "letter" and get tracking you have to jump to Priority Mail International, hence the $30 amount.

It's likely cheaper to send as a light-weight 1st class international PARCEL, which would get tracking. Still likely $14 or so at minimum.

GeoffHA the point is that the mr wants to send it as a regular mail and they cost 110$ so? I live in the mountains in France and this year I had _ envelopes missing so I cant take the risk of loosing another one but sounds very estrange to me that price,in here we paid 4€ for international 1rst class with a tracking number on it
naufrago

Unfortunately what you pay to send something here has ZERO correlation with what it costs us to send something to you. The two postal systems have completely different costs. Maybe our costs should be lower, or yours higher, or something in the middle, but ultimately you cannot compare two different country's postal costs and expect them to be the same. You cannot blame the seller/shipper for what they are forced to pay.

You asked for a letter with a tracking number. He gave you the correct answer, but unfortunately it is more than you want to pay. That isn't his fault.

Some of the shipping cost is due to demands by ebay for tracking and such.

For international out going mail from the USA, it can get pricey. Likewise one can order and be shipped packages from China to the USA for a lower postage cost than mailing a letter to a neighbor across the street in the USA.

A lot of the international pricing is set by and at the UPU, Universal Postal Union. Countries actually have not that much control over international pricing.

The last US President actually got the term Universal Postal Union into the main stream press when complaining of the postage inequities for mail from the USA to location XYZ compared to the cost of sending the same item from XYZ to the USA. The China disparity I believe was the worst as the rate dated back to when China was categorized as a developing country.

https://time.com/5680413/trump-univ...ostal-union/

https://time.com/5687134/trump-univ...-union-deal/

Edit: Time.com (formerly Time Magazine) has now disabled the links since I first posted them in another thread here a couple of weeks back. That is something I can't control. The link 51studebaker posts below still covers the subject but in the philatelic press.

Here are good search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=tru...UDCAg&uact=5

and another good story: https://www.vox.com/2018/10/19/1799...union-treaty

When I mail a letter to France, it costs 1.20 US$. How can they do it so inexpensively I wonder?

Considering that naufrago pays € 4 for this service in France and I would pay € 9.05, because it only is available as part of registration and registered mail from Russia carries a charges of 265 Roubles (€ 2,5 - €3) shows that there is quite some control.

A basic international stamp for Europe costs €1.50 in Spain, € 1.55 for the whole world from the Netherlands but £1.70 (around €2) in the UK. That is almost 30% more expensive in the UK than in Spain or the Netherlands.

According to an online search...



https://www.linns.com/news/us-stamp...foreign-mail

Don

DON,THANKS FOR THE ARTICLE,BUT STEEL BEYOND MY COMPREHENSION THE PRICES PRACTICE BU USPS FOR A SINGLE LETTER LESS THAN 20GS REGARDSAND THANKS TO EVERYBODY FOR THE ADVISE
NAUFRAGO

naufrago:I dont know the value of the stamp in question but your buyer wants to give you a hard time.Just refund the guy through his paypal address and just send him 2$ again through paypal and ask hm to mail your stamp back by ordinary mail.(It may take weeks to get it anyway)If he is honest you will get it back.If he is dishonest just write it off...

I am sorry perf12, if the dealer is following ebay's rules, he is an honest dealer. It is those rules requiring tracking which is what the $30 US postage provides.

there are troublesome buyers and troublesome dealers.

but a lot of all these returns could be avoided if sellers took their time describing their objects truthfully and competent.

theres a storm brewing in the danish auction world at the moment, seems some professionel dealers deliberately "forget" to describe their objects thoroughly in order to fetch a higher price.

I fully recognize that I am hopelessly biased in this regard, but I am a big believer that relatively few mistakes are made by sellers. Sellers go to a lot of trouble to find and describe characteristics that make a stamp MORE valuable, yet during such examinations they fail to note problems that should be part of their full disclosure.

For example, I have had dozens of instances where the seller went to the trouble to describe a stamp as MNH, yet they don't describe hidden toning spots or partially toned gum. So let me understand- you examined the gum for hinging but didn't notice that the gum was half brown/half normal? Bull...

Likewise, many sellers easily give in to the temptation of listing almost anything as MNH when a more focused examination will clearly show evidence of hinging. When this is brought to their attention, the response is often that their "eyesight isn't what it once was."

Nonsense. If this is the case, you should not be selling stamps, or at the very least, not sell any stamps as "MNH."

These situations simply happen too often to be a series of purely accidents or mistakes. But I no way am I passing judgement on the OP- mistakes do happen too.

In the several thousand ebay listings reviews on the Stamp Smarter site I can only remember 2-3 listings that the misidentifications were in 'favor' of a buyer. This is not a statistical anomaly, the overwhelming majority 'favor' the seller. In my opinion the volume and frequency of bad ebay listings is overwhelming, at times it feels like it is the dumping ground for every piece of crap in our hobby. I think that much of it is coming from 'hobbyists-turned-sellers'.

Yes, there are some good sellers and some good listings, but it takes experience and time to find them.
Don