Ned,

I believe your analogy is fairly accurate. About the only other thing you can do to help protect yourself is to require delivery confirmation on every single package. Which we do. That cost is passed on to the buyer. It doesn't matter if it is a First Class, Parcel Post or Priority, Delivery confirmation goes on every single package. Of course, delivery confirmation on Priority is free if you use online service to process the shipping.

It has been my experience, that with delivery confirmation, as far as item not received disputes, the delivery confirmation number supports the seller and the buyer lost the dispute.

Now fraudulent card use is another matter. So to help us a bit, we do not ship "Unconfirmed shipping" address payments the same day. We wait another 24 hours to ship as usually any problems pops up in the first 24 hours.

You can also stop a package that has a delivery confirmation number on it. So let's say you ship John Doe's package today and then tomorrow the money goes "poof" Contact the USPS and they will stop your package. Even if you have to pay to have it sent back, it is better than losing the entire product. I have had to do that before. And then I required the buyer to pay the shipping cost again.

And this "poof" issue with Paypal is another reason I do not submit feedback until after the buyer has their item and all is good. If something should happen, an Unpaid item dispute can jog them along. If they don't respond, the very least I can do for the eBay community is post a negative feedback remark letting everyone know what happened. Quite effective.





Judy/blue

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