Ebay sellers in the USA are lazy.

My experience with the GSP when I bought my Mountain Dew Xbox, was pretty good. There was no bubble wrap whatsoever though, still came in perfect condition. Luckily though considering the amount of stories you hear about it, they really shouldn't be opening packages people have protected them self.

 

I do not know if it is related but some country's postal services and customs are jerkier than others. I just shipped a Fishing rod spinning wheel to Australia with Canada post Small packet international air mail. The service is supposed to take 5-10 days worldwide but it took 30 days for my customer to receive his item, I was one day short of sending refund. I suspect it got stuck at the customs.
At the same time I used the same service to ship something to Denmark and it arrived in 3 business days... Go figure.

Funny thing with GSP is that for some types of item it is actually not all that bad. I am not exactly sure how shipping is calculated with GSP but sometimes It can actually get lower than if the seller was shipping by himself.
I have had good GSP experience buying medium sized crap lots and cheap arcade boards. But for single games bought separately and combined to ship together it is absolutely atrocious. And yes they open all packages, not that I care really as long as the stuff arrives safely. I had one issue recently of a poorly packaged arcade board I received, a CPS2 actually and the plastic exterior got damaged during transport due to no padding at all. I initially suspected GSP for bad repackaging but the idiot seller actually admitted to have packaged it like that himself.

 

Not sure, I've had stuff get opened by customs (I imported some Final Fantasy official plush toys, customs cut them open and sewed them back up) and received them in less than a week and with a notice included that customs had done what they did.

None of my other parcels that were damaged or open included customs tape, notices or anything of the sort. If there's any sort of hold or delay caused by customs, they have to put stickers on them to say that they were held by customs for [x] amount of time.

I've had stuff sent from Japan or Hong Kong and arrive the next day via EMS, it's literally just been stuff from the US that's taken forever. I've had stuff without tracking on the slowest international shipping from various places in Europe, including Italy and no issues so far.

 

I am not sure either but it does seem relevant to the situation that made me start this thread. USA based sellers tend to be stuck in their own bubble more than people shipping out of other countries.
I think it is because they have a big, cheap and easy local market. The best in the world actually. They are not forced to deal with the realities of international commerce like people in other countries are.

As a result they often just refuse to ship outside USA, which I am ok with, despite being critical of the attitude.
But on the other hand many want the money from international buyers without the added work, they want it to be as easy as shipping local. However it is not as easy in truth.
They will take your money but then secretly resent the added work you, YOU inflict them, and will be tempted to botch parts of the job, such as failing to realize that other countries have different street address formulation. Then they fuck up the address and the package gets stuck for weeks. Then they will resent you even more for the added trouble, after all, it is not their fault if you are not a Murican!
GSP was created as a response to this. To give American sellers what they wanted, international money without the added work. However it comes at a price for everyone, except ebay and Pitney bowes, these guys are really happy.

I know I might sound like I am being prejudiced toward Americans. It is not the case, I like you guys. There are plenty of good international sellers in the US. But by my own experience I simply have to say that way too many are acting like spoiled brats when it comes to shipping outside the US.

 

On about business shipping internationally, the online shopping company that use to work will only ship to Canada and Western Europe, not even all of the EU countries. The reason was that most international credit cards do not have the address verification system that is used in the US and Canada. When an international credit card is used, the merchant doesn't know if the billing address match what the customer said it was.

The owners of the company basically look at so few orders that were placed from international customers compare to US customers, they rather not take the rise of fraudulent(stolen credit cards) sales and shipment issue with delay, damage, or lost orders. Beside they had enough customers in the US that most of their hot products were easily sell out without the international orders.

 

Truly not having a go at you individually, but I never understand this attitude.

If an international buyer is willing to pay the shipping cost, how is 'it's too expensive so I won't ship to you' a valid excuse for not selling internationally? Sure, there may be a host of other reasons someone does not want to ship overseas...but using that!?!?!?!?! No no no, just a fib, laziness, A N Other.

Still, I hardly ever buy anything from the US, virtually never through Ebay, so don't have a horse in that particular race thankfully. One of the many perks of collecting retro NTSC-J, and the UK being treated relatively well in terms of current gen titles.

 

This, I fully agree with. In fact I do the same thing, I now tend to only ship to "reliable places" ( Canada, USA, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and that is it.) Also using only air mail mind you. Surface mail is too slow for ebay. I will use surface mail for someone I trust and understands it can take months but not on ebay anymore.

I used to sell full worldwide with lowest possible shipping price but after a few bad experiences I think you just shoot your own foot sometimes.

I shipped an expensive motherboard to Belarus and it was a freaking nightmare. Could have been worse actually, the buyer was pretty friendly. The motherboard took 3 months to arrive and tracking number stopped being updated as soon as it left Canada. In the meanwhile an "item not received" case was opened ( which on ebay.ca is just the kind of thing to make you lose your Top Rated seller status ). The buyer actually closed the claim on my promise to fully refund him after launching a Postal investigation and having it conclude. I launched a Canada post Investigation, sent the case number to the buyer. Package was eventually delivered after near 3 months.

Same thing happened when I shipped a bunch of books to Nicaragua through cheap surface mail. It took 6 week for the package to be delivered, actually it is normal but long enough for the buyer to start a claim.

As a result I no longer ship surface mail, air mail only. And I tend to avoid countries with crap postal services unless they accept to pay for Registered Express post. But this service is so freaking expensive that basically it does not happen.

 

Looked it up you are correct: https://www.usps.com/ship/first-class-international.htm My mistake.

In the U.S first class postage is only to 13oz which is why I got confused.

 

^^^ This is the main thing. No extra effort is usually needed to sell stuff in the USA unless it is very niche or obscure.

 

I've experienced this service before. I was kind of confused as to why my item was being sent to a US address at first, then forwarded over to me, but then it all clicked in.

To be honest, I prefer just working with a seller to get it sent directly without a middle man. Because with middle men your playing a game of telephone essentially. Especially with people who claim one thing, and people who claim another.

One small thing I noted which kind of bugs me is US buyers who think they are the center of the universe. Ie. They never provide any information on their location. They just give you a street name, some postal/zip code and expect you to know it's a US address. Doesn't seem to happen with other countries, just with US buyers from my experience.

 

I bought a Core Grafx from the US via GSP and they had opened it to check the contents, but their method ofopening the package was to slice along the side of the box with a knife. There is now a 2 inch long slice down the side of the console.