Selling To Switzerland On Ebay

Beware of shipping to this country as it can take over 6 weeks for items to arrive.
I sent items to a buyer (trombone-mg) back in December and they finally got there in late February. Meanwhile the buyer opened a not received case and ebay gave him full refund . The items were then delivered so ebay told me to send a message to the buyer asking for payment vis paypal. As usual no response. I appealed the case to ebay and they did nothing. Their customer service is very poor. I am thinking about dropping international orders but
i have a few loyal clients overseas. Any thoughts on the matter or any possible recourse ?Thanks

Switzerland has the best postal service in the world - the delay was presumably with USPS or Swiss customs.

Chances are the delay did not arise in Switzerland. It has a very good postal infrastructure.

I'm a dealer on ebay, located in the Netherlands and shipping worldwide nearly always with regular mail. The situation you describe happens regularly. Shipping times vary a lot and sometimes there are huge delays. Most of them are either due to customs or, in my opinion, more frequently due to transport problems. An extra problem for me is that the shipping times ebay indicates are based on fewer shipments and are less accurate than the times mentioned for US-based sellers.
When I receive an item not received in case, I always take care that I communicate with the customer and I give refunds before ebay steps in. In this way, I try to build a customer relationship with the buyer and this increases the likelihood that the customer comes back to you with the message that they have received the item. The problem is then that there is no refund the refund button within ebay. For small amounts, I let the customer keep the items, and thank them for their honesty. For larger amounts, I ask them how they want to pay me (Customers can pay in a lot of different ways within the ebay managed payment system) and most of the time we find a solution (sometimes I make a dummy listing for that customer that he/she can use to make the payment).
Two other remarks on the situation you describe:
1 December is a terrible month for shipment of items as the postal services are overwhelmed with the Christmas mail.
2 You are thinking about stopping with international orders. My question is, does the situation you describe happen only with international orders or also with domestic orders? I can recall some treads where there were a lot of complaints about USPS and the sometimes very poor delivery times.

Thanks Hans for all the valuable information you provided. I dont have any problems with local orders only the international ones. I know items can be tied up in customs for several weeks. ebay does have very unrealistic delivery times for both domestic and internatio9nal orders. If the items were only as few dollars I would just write it off. This buyers order was over 150.00 and he will not reply to messages from myself or ebay. Looks like I will have to eat the situation and ebay will not do anything. Happy stamping in the Netherlands !! I have no problems with shipping to your country and have many happy clients .

The only way to be protected when shipping internationally from the US is by using eBay International Shipping.

Which is why many US sellers don't ship overseas...

IMHO, of course.

John

Unfortunately, "stamps, coins & paper money" fall on the ebay International Shipping program blacklist. See https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/s...gram?id=5348

That said, I list stamps for sale all the time on ebay and it adds the International Shipping program by default. I haven't made an international sale in some time, so I'm not sure if this exclusion is a recent development or if stamp orders are in practice still covered by the program. Perhaps others can chime in with their experiences?

I stand corrected - I had no idea that this was the policy...

Another reason not to ship overseas, then.

Thanks for pointing it out!

John

I've been buying ebay stuff from the States for decades but it seems that this has ended more or less. The reason is exactly this stupidity:

The only way to be protected when shipping internationally from the US is by using ebay International Shipping.

This adds about $30 to the shipping costs (though I have seen idiot lots that added $70 shipping costs - I have no idea how one can achieve that). Without any benefits for me - except the package goes through customs which adds a $20 "service fee" plus tax (on everything, stamps in the mail, stamps on the mail, ebay fees etc). Customs also adds up to a week on the Swiss side.

If I bought a $5 item now, I'd have to pay around $30-$60 in total fees. Obviously that is a no sale.

I list stamps for sale all the time on ebay and it adds the International Shipping program by default.
Disable this option and you will have overseas customers.

Fortunately there are still sellers around (fewer and fewer as time goes on) that have disabled this ebay shipping stupidity which save me $55 easily.

As for shipping from the States to Switzerland, December has been a "bad month" for decades. It is the USPost that has been the culprit, in ALL cases. When Linn's Stamp Journal was a paper thing, December/January issues would usually arrive between anytime from February to April (often not in sequential order).


This applies to the usual $5-$10 ebay lots - of course $500 lots are a different matter as far as security is concerned for both sides. For all the decades I've bought stuff on ebay, not a single lot was lost in the mails

I am in the UK and bought a few covers off a UK based seller. The letter did not arrive, so after about 6 weeks requested a refund which I received. About 3 months later the letter arrived and I advised the seller that I wanted to pay[ it was only a small amount] He refused the payment, and the ebay system prevented me from sending him the funds. So even though this was a one country UK based transaction it was not without problems.

All USPS service is very slow now thanks mostly to the "Delivering for America" 10-year plan. Oh, the irony. When a Priority Mail package now regularly takes 7-10 days to be delivered within the States just imagine what they can do to International mail.

Don't know how it is now, but a few years back parcels sent via the US ebay international shipping were to be addressed to some podunk place on the Canadian border. Parcels containing items that contravened the import regulations of the destination country got diverted to a firm at this podunk location, whence they would be opened, photographed and then relisted on ebay.

The UK version was based in an industrial estate east of Lichfield. I had a wreck of a camera bound for Germany "confiscated" because it contained mahogany, which I had mentioned in the listing. ebay refunded the buyer and I kept the money. I guess the camera went to a local auction house, or maybe a skip.

Thanks, have just done this. I'm surprised this was even being applied to my stamp sales in the first place as stamps are allegedly excluded from eligibility in the program, but there's some ebay logic for you, I suppose.

Interesting. I have sold a couple of covers in the past 90 days using ebay International Shipping, but no stamps. The most recent one went to Canada. I was charging $1.95 shipping, and the ebay charged the buyer $14.06 shipping.

Theft of the mails has been going on forever. As a young guy back in the 1960s, I managed to get into Czechoslovakia for a week or so where I mailed a box of excess clothing and a few purchases back to the U.S. That box never arrived. More recently, I've had ebay stamp purchases from Tunisia and France not arrive. ebay is impossible to deal with, and they often have no idea what to do or just won't do anything. When the sellers refused me any refund, I got my credit card company to refund the amount to me.

Since about the mid-1970s -- 50 years -- I've purchased a lot of stamps from Switzerland. It's one of my main collecting areas. I've never failed to receive any of those purchases. So Switzerland's mail service seems very reliable to me. The U.S. Postal Service is today much slower than it used to be and overworked and overwhelmed and not as reliable as it once was.

Not to make light of this, but you may know that over a hundred or so years ago with the advent of Rural Free Delivery and Parcel Post, it was apparently briefly possible to pay enough postage to send a child through the mail system. A few people did that, presumably to an aunt or grandparents' house. For a child, riding in the mail car of the train might have been exciting. That soon stopped, but I wonder if any child ever got lost in the mails? "When I was very little, I got lost in the mails but these nice people here took me in and raised me."

As for long-delayed overseas stamp purchases, I've had a few that took up to two months to get here to the U.S. I'm pretty patient so I don't contact an overseas seller until at least a month has gone by and often longer. It would be nice to know whose postal service was responsible for any delay. Once upon a time, each stage of the journey was marked with a postmark so you could trace the entire journey including each post office or postal system that handled it, and those postmarks had dates on them. That doesn't seem to be done anymore, so who knows where the problem areas are? From western Europe to the U.S. today should not reasonably take more than a week or perhaps 10 days at the most. In fact, that's how long it took in the late 19th century -- using steamships!

Charfield mail train disaster. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/.../7667017.stm