In my shipping experiences overseas, it went like this:
I sold some sound cards to a guy in Sweden, and he demanded they be shipped first class because shipping in boxes to Sweden was expensive. Yes, lets stick a soundcard in an uninsured, barely padded to fit the first class size, envelope. No insurance, no tracking. I did it. I was too optimistic about the shipping process. Rookie mistake.
That shit arrived more smashed than a 16 year old whore at an underage drinking party. What was he expecting. He told me to stick 3 or 4 cards in an envelope and launch them his way. I tried in vain to pad them. You can't pad 4 PCI/ISA cards very well if you want it to still count as first class.
He demanded a refund.
3 weeks later after PayPal reviewed all the horseshit, which includes the e-mails where he said he didn't care if it was unsafe or unreliable, they told him to go f*ck himself. It still took me 3 weeks to find out if I got to keep my 60$ for the sale or not. That's lame. I wanted to go blow the money on D&D books and shit.
I shipped an Amiga to Brazil. Dude didn't want priority. He wanted parcel. After a bunch of fanagling and dicking around, I ended up shipping priority. It only took about a week of arguing in e-mails for him to understand that shipping an A500 and all of the related accessories any way but the fastest/safest way, was asking for a problem. He finally realized the extra 20$ was probably worth it after I sent him a picture of a smashed C64. I didn't tell him I smashed it with a hammer. He thought it arrived that way due to parcel post. >:] The point is, if it were someone that was domestic, they'd have happily paid priority to ship it, and I wouldn't have had a half-packed Amiga500 sitting on my floor for a week.
I sent two 1541 floppy drives and a C64 power brick to a guy in Britain through eBay. He claims they never arrived, and I ended up getting f*cked and had to refund him.
I found out they did arrive, because I saw that dumb motherf*cker reselling them on eBay using the same pictures I used, about a month later. I flagged the auction, got eBay to reinvestigate the claim. Seeing as I provided the same pictures, and was able to prove they were in MY house, that dude got f*cked. They tore his auction down and de-refunded him. Then I am pretty sure they closed his eBay down. He sent me a death threat. I loled. Even though I won, I still wasted weeks of time, and almost lost a bunch of money. If I had sent it domestically, I would have been safer. Except for the death threat part.
I had a handful of other experiences like these, where the buyer is basically a retard and wants the cheapest "throw my shit in the back of a plane/boat and hope it gets here" method. If it doesn't work out properly, they always cry like a bitch and demand refunds.
There was ONE smart dude. This guy was in f*ckING NORWAY. He wanted my PC-XT. I said "I will only ship this thing domestic. it weighs like 50lbs". He contacted me anyways and this is what he said (more or less).
"I have to have that PC-XT. I will pay you whatever the priority shipping is. I don't care if its 500$. It needs to be insured so it arrives safely."
I couldn't pass that up. It cost him nearly 300$ just to have the shit shipped to him. It arrived safe and sound 3 days after I shipped it, all in one piece. Yay.
The problem is, this guy was obviously obsessed with XTs (theyre scarce in Norway, I guess?). He wanted it THAT bad. 300$ to ship it bad. Not every oversea buyer is like this.
Most of them are cheapass lowballers that can't be f*cked to pay the extra costs for reliable/organized/safe shipping. I almost think they do it on purpose because they know they often win if the phantom package never arrives. You have no way to prove if it did or not.
You have to plan for the dipshits.
What I do now is I only ship things internationally if they fit in a flatrate box. If you don't like the flatrate, you can blow me. Come pick it up yourself.
The only exception to this rule is when I ship out Insanity. If that gets lost or smashed, I have like 50300234 copies left since noone wants the game anyway.
