This is something I have noticed when I ship a high value item overnight express through their shipping label download system; without fail expresses get treated as two day priorities even when the items are dropped off at a PO by the cut-off time for cross country shipping. I use my corporate express account and without fail it is there next day. Also I am finding that first class shipments are traveling at the same time for delivery as priorities. Anyone else have similar experiences?
Overnight Express guarantees delivery by a certain time the following day, only if mailed by a certain pickup time the day before. Often Priority mailings travel just as fast because the Express mailing just misses its pickup time at the point of origin. Yes, I too have seen First Class mail travel just as fast as Priority to many distant destinations, but I've also observed that such fast deliveries are unpredictable, and cannot be relied upon.
Supposedly they "guarantee" it at usps, but my experience is that the ebay "expresses" get handled differently than when you send them outside of the ebay system, and I know there is a cutoff time, some towns good luck with a cross country shipment after 3:30. But you go one town over and it gets there the next day. Here I have mail that will go to Hartford/Springfield for processing and one town over it goes down to Kearney, NJ that night. Expresses have a better shot at next day, but according to my experience, if you do the transaction at the counter vs. through ebay shipping, you have a much better chance of next day.
Can't say I don't believe that. I have NEVER once used eBay / PayPal label shipping in my 6 years in business. There's no getting it done right like doing it yourself, so I'm not going to depend on them any more than I absolutely need to. They're just too big to get it all right. It is inconvenient for me to make all of the postal runs myself, but that's a cost of doing business that I'd rather absorb than leave good performance to chance.
Never used ebay for shipping? I've sent hundreds of packages through them without real problems. The advantage of using ebay is there are so many 5 and 10 dollar items ebay sellers ship, numismatics is less like to get stolen issues. "Oh, its another ebay item, must be a baseball card"....
I hear you, but get this . . . In my 6 years selling on eBay, I've lost 6 or 7 packages, only 1 of which was an outbound coin I was returning to the original seller. That coin didn't get lost. It was signed for, but not by the intended recipient. We never figured out if it was delivered to the wrong address or if it was stolen. Even more interesting is the following . . . every one of my losses in the mail has been a gold coin . . . 100% of them. I estimate gold coins are less than 50% of all of my business, but if they are exactly half of all of my transactions, the odds against lost coin being gold are 2 raised to the 6th or 7th power . . . either 1 chance in 64 or 1 in 128. Improbable! Now I'm a pretty scientific guy and, to the best of my knowledge, there is no technology that permits one to differentiate between copper, nickel, silver and gold in an unopened package. Why do I tell you this? Because most, if not all of those lost inbound packages were mailed to me with eBay / PayPal labels, displaying no outward indication of value.
OK, some interesting facts, Tough Coins, it was good to meet you at the Nashua show a month or so ago. The one time that I had packages missing was around Thanksgiving last year, a Colonial note and a gold coin, both at the same small NH post office where one of the workers told me she was an active ebay seller. The two sales were missing for around 10 days, I actually had a copy of the desk worker's receipt, an older gentleman. So when they went missing I gave him a record of the receipt he had given me, scanned and copied a picture of the receipt over at PCGS forum, and what do you know? They showed up several days later after disappearing. I wonder if postal employees could have sophisticated technology to identify what is in an ebay package based on the to and from people? The technology could then tell them it was a high end item, may be worth a look-see, eh? You never know. I do know there have been major theft rings over the years at the usps, one apparently was operating out of the PO where NGC used to get its mail in NJ, another thief robbed thousands of items in CO before getting nabbed. If justice were truly just the thieves would get the electric chair or firing squad.
