As a Canadian I am often confronted to GSP's outrageous shipping charges and import fees. Not sure how GSP works but once in a while you find some items with curiously low shipping with GSP. The same items by adifferent seller could be almost thrice as expansive to ship. So I just found a bunch of cheap arcade boards that had low GSP shipping and bought a bunch and the GSP even gave me further reduction in shipping of over 50% I am pretty happy because I do not think I would get such a low quote from a seller not using GSP. Not sure what is up, I almost expect to receive a email saying there was a mistake.
These GSP fees can really be deal breakers. I once saw headphones at 99$ with 40$ GSP shipping + import fees... I'll be glad if there's a way to lower those!
GSP is a bad idea for all parites involved. My understanding is one of the ways Pitney Bowes makes money on this. Is by stripping out the packaging. So if your seller packs it in a nice secure anti-static bag wrapped in a lot of bubble wrap and then padded with newspaper. Pitney Bowes is going to get that toss a lot of it and plop it in a mailer and hope for the best, but then again if anything goes wrong it's on the seller anyway.
I wonder how the GSP calculates the shipping cost. Can a seller from USA here answer this? Do you need to input Item size and weight and then it is calculated by GSP?
I shipped a PS1 Debug to a guy in Italy and it was heavily damaged when it arrived. All my padding had been removed. Never GSPing again.
Thanks for the warning, Would it be possible to negotiate with a seller not to use the GSP even if that's the service they are providing for international shipping?
I am currently on the process of doing something on those lines. Seller is super slow to respond. I have received several packages from the GSP, did not have broken item issues so far, but I have no doubt they repackage it in smaller boxes. The boxes I received were pretty small but packed tightly and contained light items. Flat things like arcade PCB or heavy things are probably more at risk.
lol what a crappy program. That should not become a trend. How ebay's decision makers did this kind of "deal"? Really. In 2014, years of "expertise" and something so pathetic happens. Is that even legal? I always wondered how they even "know" how much are the customs taxes. I mean. They really have all the official docs of the buyer's country and know which taxes apply to each product? What kind of contract they have with the buyers country to pay the customs by themselves? At first I thought, "cool! that's just something that I don't know and that's nice." EMS for example is almost always (90%+) held at customs, so if they are paying the tax and I'll receive the item without the hassle of going to the postal office, pay, sometimes report abusive tax, etc, that's ok. But no. It's more like bullshit.
I've also contacted a seller to see if something can be sorted out. I want to buy a game just for the case, so I'd hate for it to arrive broken because of poor repackaging.
