Shipping from Germany

So I just noticed this.
This is first time I bought something off Roma Numismatics auction and it'll probably be my last.

Invoice was from 2.1 and I paid it same afternoon.



I didn't receive any notification (not even confirmation for paypal payment) so on the 10th I emailed them, and they sent me a tracking number.
The tracking doesn't work on USPS website, other than indicating it was registered mail.


So I traced it on royal mail website and this is what I got


As you can see, these guys charged me $35.71 to send 7 grams of goods registered mail and they did it 10 days after I paid.

I can dispute this next week with paypal (based on their shipping charge), and get refunded regardless the coins arrive or not. Should I do it? Just to punish this type of irresponsible behavior driven by greed?

 

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Couple of months ago I received a coin from Germany in like 5 days.

 

Uk mail is very expencive
I must say prices in usa also went up this year.

 

In the US the price of everything has gone up with the exception of fuel which is now cheaper than it has been in my "driving" life.

 

@brassnautilus, yeah... Roma does not do a good job with getting coins in the mail. I wish they would hire more help for post-auction processing. Making it worse, it usually takes 3+ weeks for me to receive the Roma coins after they are finally shipped. There is usually a big black hole of information when it is passed off to the USPS. I always fret but eventually it hits USPS tracking, sometimes a couple of weeks later. The 3-4 weeks from auction to receiving my purchases, combined with the exchange rate, always make me reluctant to bid but they do often have coins I want.
...

Followup on my recent Pecunem issue: I finally received notice of shipping yesterday, nine days after the auction. This is so atypical of Pecunem, who usually ships a day or two after the auction. I hate to see them fall to Roma's level of shipping inefficiency .

 

I feel like most of the big auction houses are starting to fall behind lately and I have no idea why. The case I had in October/November where it took USPS a month for a domestic first class package was preceded by Agora taking a week after payment to get the package in the mail. A coin ordered in November from London Ancient Coins wasn't in the mail until the first week of January and most recently I still haven't received a shipping notice from Asta Artemide for a coin bought and paid for in late January. I always pay within 24h of invoice and usually within an hour of getting the invoice because I work at a job where my email is always up on one of my monitors and I am always watching it. Honestly the only one who has consistently shipped packages quickly for me is CNG who usually has it in the mail within 24h of payment.

 

Poor delivery service is problem with many of the European auction houses. I bet you wouldn't believe it, but Arturo Russo of NAC told me recently they only have 5 employees.

 

CNG rocks!! ... they're like clockwork (I always know it's gonna be in the mailbox two Fridays after the show ... yah, whatev ... I'm a fan)

 

Big-time agreed!

 

My latest Vespasian was from the CNG auction last week. If it wasn't for the holiday weekend I would've had it in 2 days.

 

Living in PA meant CNG purchases get to me the day after they billed, never failed. That's hardly what I'm asking for though, just wanted it to be reasonable, and registered/snail mail is anything but that.

Pecunem uses Fedex expedited options, I really don't mind they take few more days to handle the shipping.
There's nothing right about charging your customer 35 dollar and use a 5 dollar service. It's not the same issue.

 

The shipping included insurance, not just postage. On a nearly one thousand pound purchase, the amount for insurance would have been on the order of 2%. I don't find that out of line.

 

It doesn't cost that much, and this should be something covered by the buyer premium as this is just 0.85% and the premium is usually 15-21%.

If the purchase was 100s of thousands of dollars, then how is $35 shipping supposed to cover the insurance?


Edit:
To clarify. Couriers apply discounts to business accounts, and these discounts are global. Fedex and UPS usually give 50-70% discount on international shipping for businesses, so when it says 85 cents per $100 of insurance, it's only like 40 cents. For 1500 dollar, insurance cost would be less than $10.
This doesn't work the same way with postal services. Using cheaper/slower options meant insurance would cost more. Doesn't matter though, we all know this isn't the reason they chose registered mail.

 

I'm not sure how you get to the point where they're "driven by greed", but I think it is at worst a case of poor backroom processing and an imprecise system of calculating shipping fees. I don't know for sure, but just based on how they've billed me, it seems to be GBP 12.50 if the invoice total is below GBP 500, and GBP 25 if it's between GBP 500 and GBP 1500 (maybe higher? I've not spent more than that with Roma before).

I just received my coins from the same sale as yours today, and this was the timeline (which is as good as it gets for Roma for me):

Jan 30 - Sale date
Feb 1 - Invoice received and payment made by wire transfer
Feb 5 - Shipped and tracking info received
Feb 18 - Coins received

As I live in Singapore, I suffer the mystifying and myriad methods that various sellers use to calculate international shipping fees. Just from the US alone, I've been charged:

- $16 for 6 coins worth $550 (Frank Robinson)
- $22 for 1 coin worth $120 (Vauctions)
- $35 for 1 coin worth $500 (Stack's)
- $35 for 80 coins worth $500 (Stack's again!)

CNG is currently holding 7 coins for me worth about $550, and my shipping fee total for them is $42. I've stopped trying to figure out how it all works, but as shipping fees seem to be going in the opposite direction of oil prices, I might want to start asking how they're actually calculated to get a better fix on my total costs.

 

it's irresponsible, and for such low end shipping method the charges are unreasonable. You think 12.5 GBP for couple gram of goods with normal registered airmail is right? Have you not been buying online this past decade?

 

this is why it's driven by greed:

They spend 5 bucks sending the packages, which they charged $35 or w/e amount. It has a very low rate of actual loss, 1% if that, so 99% of their packages will get to customers, just slowly.
Now on the 1% that do get loss, they will lose money and they could only claim whatever the base insurance covers, $250 or w/e.
This $250 is sometimes less, and some times more than actual value of the content. It doesn't matter to them, the amount they "saved" from charging us insurance more than covered that loss.

Do the math, you'll see it's actually quite a bit of money can be made this way. In fact a lot of online sellers make majority of their money from overcharging shipping, for their margin on the goods are so low.

Exceptions are the more expansive packages. If you buy from lanz and other auction companies on Ebay frequent, you'd notice the more expansive items were shipped expedited. Your normal (like up to $1000 worth, each company draws the line differently) purchases on other hand are sent priority mail with no additional insurance.

Roma is an extreme case, because they didn't even send medium level mail, like equivalent of priority international. They sent registered mail...

 

actually, allow me to show you the math zumbly.
1,000 lots. each lot $1,000, 5 dollar shipping each (look at your envelops from Germany, postage amount is on there), charging $25 average, $20,000 extra received from over charged shipping.

10 lots get lost (1% loss rate), they would had to give back $10,000, without counting base insurance on the package they will get back from postal, they make $10,000 from doing nothing.

and it's fine to do this in other fields of sales, but we're buying irreplaceable goods here.

 

Personally, I would wait until you saw what the actual postage cost when the package arrives before saying the company is overcharging you. You point out the number of 12.5 GBP for a few grams of goods. For registered mail this number makes sense for me.

I don't know the UK postage system but in Canada as soon as you declare an item as being something other than paper the shipping method changes and becomes more expensive. Light packet international which is most common untracked and uninsured is $5.70, if you add tracking it jumps it to ~$16 and Xpresspost - USA is ~$30.

On the other end of things coins coming from auction houses being shipping to me are usually around 15-20 USD.

 

You'll probably be able to do better math when you actually receive your package and see what they paid for postage. It is likely to not be $5.

The postage stamp on my latest lot of 5 denarii cost them GBP 8.90 based on a package weight of 54 grams. Last August, they also charged me GBP 25 shipping fee for 170 coins that was closer to 500 grams. I don't recall the postage fee on that package, but I'm pretty sure they didn't make any money on that one. I'm still not convinced any of this is greed-driven.

In any case, it does not surprise me when sellers fix their shipping fees so as to not actually lose money on posting out coins. I did in fact ask a US seller once why I paid $20+ on shipping when it cost them more like $13 to send it to me. The answer was something along the lines of... we can't be sure until we get to the post office how much it's actually going to cost us... we make on some, we lose on more. I don't particularly like the idea of subsidizing the cost for other customers, but realize that if I pose this question to all my sellers and buy only from those whose answers satisfy me, I'd probably have very few people I can actually buy any coins from.

 

Analyses such as this one are very sensitive to the underlying assumptions. For example, if you increase the loss rate just 1% -- to 2% -- then the shipper just breaks even and makes no profit at all. Or if the actual shipping costs are $10 rather than the assumed $5, and the loss rate is 1.5%, again there is no "profit" on shipping.

I don't begrudge the auction houses whatever small amount of profit they make on shipping. I DO think their buyers' fees are a bit exorbitant, but the shipping costs are a drop in the bucket. My dealer charges me $250+ for shipping costs in auctions in which I win one or more coins. This amount is dwarfed by my buyer's fee in every case.