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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;afantiques, post: 2109225, member: 71234&quot;]<i>You&#039;re very wrong on this. The only way you can send safely out of the country by USPS is by express mail, registered mail, priority mail and all of these you can insure.</i></p><p><br /></p><p>These methods are needlessly expensive.&nbsp; And no safer than first class mail as they look more attractive to casual thieves. There is no absolute safety, but commercial insurance companies will insure First Class International, they do not care what value is on the customs label, and Shipsurance will cover numismatic items. The cost is around 1% of the insured value. Better deals are available.</p><p><br /></p><p>A few countries are excluded from cover but you can also exclude these countries from your shipping list. They are usually not places you are likely to get many buyers from anyway.</p><p><br /></p><p>Given that in general the risk is very small, self insurance is also practical and will add so little to the shipping cost no one will notice, since your base shipping cost will be as low as is available.</p><p><br /></p><p>Ebay shipping labels are a bad thing, as they prefill the customs description with the heading of the ebay item. This field should be edited to a brief and boring description, no precious metals, no jewels, not popular brand names. Just a generic wording. THe value should be about $20 for everything.</p><p><br /></p><p>My advice is based on the experience of selling over 40,000 antique and collectable items, mostly internationally, average value about $50 to $100, never anything but standard untracked airmail, and with the tiny loss rate I mentioned.</p><p><br /></p><p>Many US based sellers fear of international shipping seems to be based on both ignorance of the facilities available, hearsay from others that includes no mention of the millions of problem free transactions, and ignorance of the day to day life of the countries they might ship to.</p><p><br /></p><p>All objections can be countered rationally but you cannot convince someone, whose belief amounts to a faith, with reason. Many sellers in many countries have a belief that beyond the borders all is howling chaos, indeeed in ancient China this was official state policy, beyond the bounds of the Celestial Kingdom, only demons roamed the world.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>One other thing, if you use the USPS you have to hope that the country you&#039;re sending it to scans it. Because 99% of the time they don&#039;t bother to scan it.</i></p><p><br /></p><p>Most countries do not bother with tracking of routine mail, rightly considering it an expensive and useless frill, not worth the cost. One of the consequences of relying on tracking is that if the item is delivered to the wrong place or person, you as the recipient are stuffed, as the item (according to&nbsp; the computer) is &#039;delivered&#039;.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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