Long shipping delays are putting me off from buying coins online!

Buying online is the major source of my collection, specially ancients. However for the past 10 months or so the shipping delays have put a damper on my hobby. I even had to get refund on certain coins that were never even shipped!
Back in October I went to a coin show, and It was the only time I felt satisfied buying coins, I saw them, bought them, and held them in my hand all within few minutes (not few months as I used to, sometimes more than 3 months, and by then I'd almost lose interest on that coin).
So I've decided to only buy coins from local coin shows/shops, and from online dealers within my country/region for at least the world comes to a sense of normalcy.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Must be rough living in Oz...If the spiders, sharks, crocs, snakes, plants, heat, dingoes, jellyfish, stingrays, kangaroos, angry shielas, etc... don't get you - The shipping will.

Honestly though, that sucks that you aren't able to get things online. Just when we were getting good at this whole international shipping thing - Buy something from Europe on a Monday and get it in your mailbox half a world away by Saturday - Covid really came and messed things up.

 

Covid is a virus and doesn't dictate how each individual country reacts as there doesn't seem to be any cohesion...Maybe we shouldn't be blaming the virus and start to look at our own and others governments?

 

I live in the USA. I've been ordering ancient coins from the USA, Canada, England, and Europe, for the past 3 years. Almost all of the coins have arrived, within 3 weeks.
However, there is one coin, which I ordered from France, which was shipped via La Poste on November 17, which has still not arrived. The tracking just says "Your shipment has been handed over to La Poste by the sender." The tracking has been saying that, since November 17. Whenever I've ordered a coin, I've always gotten a package. But this coin may be the first, for which I get nothing.
I've been collecting ancients for 3 years. During that time, I've had 2 orders, in which I received the wrong coin. I had 1 order, in which the envelope was empty, except for the invoice.
I've had some orders, in which the seller never sent a tracking number, and never told me that they shipped the coin.
And, sometimes, the tracking seems to "lose track" of the package, and then suddenly the coin appears in my mail box.
All of this, means that, whenever I order a coin, I always wonder, if I'll actually get the coin. The suspense, gets on my nerves, sometimes. But 97% of the time, I get the coin.
Oh well. I'd really prefer to buy coins at coin shows. But, I never seem to have the time, to go to any coin shows, that have a decent selection of ancient coins.
I can only imagine, how nice it must be, to go to a coin show like NYINC, which has a large selection of ancient coins.

 

Actually we're more afraid of this guy, at least you have to provoke other animals in their habitat to get bitten, but magpies are suburbian death drones waiting to gouge your eyes out!

But back to shipping, I'm sure if I paid extra I could get it within weeks rather than months, but since most of my coins are budget example, the extra fee wouldn't make much sense.

 

At least you can train magpies to talk. You could teach them some great Aussie phrases that are not at all CT appropriate

 

I won a coin at a major auction house almost 2 weeks ago, paid for it immediately after the invoice appeared, via online transfer of funds from my checking account.

I just checked on the item’s status and it’s listed as paid instead of shipped. This really slow service makes me consider stop bidding in this firm’s auctions.

Here’s the coin btw. A didrachm.

 

Postal shipping has generally slowed down, domestically and internationally.

I ordered some lotion for eczema that flairs up this time of the year for me. It was shipped by Priority Mail from Seattle early December and never showed up. I did get a refund from a great seller, though.

Depending on how an item is shipped, going slower can become even slower. In the case of registered mail, which is the most secure way to ship, at least in theory, the combination of the logging and monitoring at each ponit of transit, coupled with other factors, such as bad weather, staffing shortages, covid and reduced flights, registered mail this year will generally take a long, long time to arrive.

If you have a tracked first class letter or parcel coming, that should arrive faster than registered mail, but things there can go awry as well, as was the case of my "lost" shipment last year from Israel, which went tracked first class. The tracking just went off the radar, and the USPS declared it lost after I filed a missing mail request. However, it did return to the sender nearly a year later.

 

Regarding the shipment from November of last year, which has not arrived, have you filed a missing mail request with the post office? You can file a claim with Paypal or your credit card company for a refund, but there is a time limitation (I think it is 180 days from the transaction date). You might consider doing both.

Does the seller know about the delay? You might want to give him or her a heads up.

Here's a link to the mssing mail page:

https://www.usps.com/help/missing-mail.htm

You'll want to complete the form, option 2.

 

I bought 2 coins from a seller back in October. A Galerius and a Galeria Valeria (a particular bummer since it was for my daughter). The coins made it from the seller to within 15 miles of my house and all of the sudden the tracking went dead. It said the package was sent to a "mail recovery center". Every couple of weeks I get a "still looking but can't find it" email. I have zero faith that it will ever show up

 

Thanks @robinjojo
I didn't know, that I could do that, regarding the USPS missing mail request.

 

Good luck.

 

Thanks @furryfrog02

 

Ugh, I feel your pain.

USPS is taking forever to deliver orders. I drop them off at the post office within 24 hours, they're taking up to two weeks to deliver them. One order was a 20 min drive from where I live...still hasn't been delivered yet after a week.

Especially on shipping to Australia. Found out after an auction had already been completed that I was suddenly not allowed to ship anything to AUS, so then I had four Aussie buyers to disappoint. It's been months and I still can't ship their orders...so we're all sitting around in limbo.

Had one order going to a service member in Japan (who is also a CT member) that went there and back so many times I told him the next thing we'd see is that they lost the package. Opened a case with USPS and they just closed it and marked it Resolved (without doing anything.) They then sent me a survey asking how happy I was with their service...yeah, I didn't hold back.

Luckily the package came back to me safely (thank goodness) and we tried again...went straight there.

From a seller standpoint, as someone who really makes an effort to do right by his customers, it's really frustrating.

 

Recently, I won items from both Stacks and Heritage. I paid the invoices immediately and still waited two over weeks before the items were shipped.

Here is a different problem with shipping. For many years I have been using a friend's jewelry store as my mail drop for expensive packages. Lately there has been a trend where drivers are buzzed into the store with a signature required package, they leave it on the counter and walk out without getting a signature. What's particularly galling is that when I receive an e-mailed "delivery completed" notification the driver lies and says someone signed for it and gives a name even though there is a video of them walking in and leaving without getting a signature.

I also have had FEDEX leave a signature required package on my front porch, I found it the next morning when I took Fiona (avatar picture) for her morning walk.

 

I have shipped a couple of packages where I paid for a return mail receipt. They have come back with the actual signature of the recipient [I knew what their sigs looked like]. As they say, your results may differ.

 

I have to say I have blind faith when ordering from overseas, most people are honest and wouldn't last in business long with a reputation for unshipped packages.
My worst experience, reported in another thread, was UPS messing up customs and the Polish seller using an invoice for Zlotys which UPS converted to Sterling and then charged fees that were in excess of the two coins.
Eventually UPS delivered but the coins were in a depot 40 miles from my house for nearly 10 months.
The best ever experience was something shipped from New York on a Friday that arrived on Monday! This was USPS priority teamed with Royal Mail. I checked on the Monday afternoon to see if the package had been shipped and unbelievably the status read "delivered". I assumed it was a scam until I found the packet behind my front door.
The only time I ever lost anything was a consignment of medals send from an auction house in Arizona to a friend in Portland, Oregon that I was to collect later in the year as the auction house doesn't ship offshore. The medals never arrived, I had no service or sympathy from the auction house and never used them again.
There is also an apparent disparity between some German Auction Houses, one states it could take 2 weeks to obtain an export license, and another ships immediately and if I pay $25 for Fedex, they arrive in 3 days.
I received a package recently from John Anthony recently by ordinary mail that arrived in 5 days. No complaints there!.

 

I don't want to come across as disparaging an entire country, but I have to say that 90% of the harrowing moments I have had with shipping were associated with French auction houses. They seem to hold no responsibility for shipping your item, at any cost. Or for getting the customs paperwork for Cultural Goods, the threshold for which for some collectibles is quite low. Those can be daunting challenges to arrange from overseas with language barriers, etc.

 

I've been mailing coins to "down under" for years and it never took more than a week. Recently one of my customers told me his coin had arrved two months after I mailed it. Well, better late than never!

 

We ordered six items through site sellers for our granddaughter's birthday February 1st. Five have already arrived but the one from China sent an update and said it would not arrive before February 8th. my error, I did not look close enough while ordering. Order date: January 6th. by snail mail. Like they say look closely it's a matter of location, location, location!