Someone bought something from me on 30th December, it was posted 1st class the next day.
Then this weekend I get a case opened with a sob story about how its not turned up and its a present etc but something about it made me suspicious.
So rather than take the £20 loss I wrote a long winded bs response about how as a royal mail business customer I have a receipt showing it was taken by royal mail at exactly 15:53 on 31/12 and so their fraud department is investigating and will contact them shortly. If they find they have lost it they'll give you a refund but it will take 15 working days for their investigation. Let me know if it turns up so I can call off the investigation.
GUESS WHAT? A few hours later I get an email back saying it turned up today and they have closed the case. Coincidence? Maybe, but I'm starting to think that royal mail isn't quite as bad at losing things as my buyers make out.
The complete step-by-step guide to get back to selling today!
It all depends on how much you want to avoid negative feedback and these scammers know that. If you dont send recorded post then there will always be a risk of this.
Ive heard that if you get them to raise an INR case via Ebay rather than rend/resend via just messaging then there is a better chance that Ebay will catch these scammers out because if a seller reports them and they see that their last 10 purchases have resulted in refunds then they should throw them off.
It all depends how much time your willing to put in - i have checked feedback of a buyer before see who they have bought off in the past and asked the previous 5 if they have ever sent refunds to the buyer but only 1 got back to me and said yes they had. If sellers dont pull together and raise a case each time then this will always happen.
Work out the extra cost of sending recorded against the cost of refunds/re-sends and you will be surprised to see that the refunds/re-send losses are small compared to upgrading your postage.
Last edited by Themav; 01-08-2014 at 07:37 AM.
Reason: grammar
I'll do some investigating, just to satisfy my own curiosity.
It's an extra £1.10 for proof of delivery. I lose about one parcel every 100, giving me a loss of anything between £2 and £20. The extra £1.10 would cost me an extra £110 for 100 parcels.
So it's not worth spending an extra £110 trying to insure against a £20 loss.
I send a lot of small packets from the UK to the USA. I attach to the labels one which I myself have printed - they have a barcode on them and "secure tracked mail". You used to be able to buy something similar in big rolls on Ebay but Ebay stopped the company selling them. They put off casual scammers or can be used to scare them into admitting the package has arrived. But you can print them yourself onto sticky backed labels.
When someone in the US tells me their package has not arrived I tell them I have a contact in the Homeland Security dept where all the packages are scanned and logged into a database. I will have him check the database for when it entered the USA and see if its being held by customs etc. If the package does not arrive in the next few days please let me know. We have another contact (a relative) in the US postal inspectorate. He can arrange for a local agent to go interrogate the staff at your local depot who deliver to your zip. I will send him a photo of the front of the package as we photograph everything before it goes out. Yadda yadda.
After this message the erstwhile "missing" packages tend to turn up pretty sharpish with a neighbour who took them in and forgot, etc.
Ive found that a scattering of choice phrases like "Special security measures" "Federal Crime" "Mail Fraud" and "Thorough investigation" can cause sufficient panic to make the item appear.
I would not use these barcode labels in the UK because buyers tend to know what Royal Mail labels look like.
Outside the UK its a different ball game.
I dont know what ALL the types of postage used in the USA look like in terms or postmarks or labels. If anyone demands a tracking # I just give them the # of a package thats in transit. Not too difficult as most of my packages go to the USA and all the Ruby Lane ones are tracked. So there are some nice tracking numbers for "in transit" items.
Typically they will only look at it once anyway to check that its en route. Then this package arrives with a bar code on it. Once they get the package they are not going to be anal enough to compare it with the tracking # I gave them because they already have their widget.
If it backfires I can always say "oops my assistant must have put the wrong # on your paperwork".
Since I began using these sticky labels with barcodes I have only had one completely lost package and that was in the UK!
Last edited by biglouis999; 01-12-2014 at 08:28 PM.
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