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Couriers - Eye opener


Guest MoJo

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I get that, but if you type in the value on these sites and it’s over the regular limit a prompt comes up that extra insurance is required, and asks you to select how much you now require. So how hard would it be that if you type in guitar a prompt comes up saying no insurance is available on this item, which would then prohibit the extra insurance value box from popping up and allowing you to type in a value which isn’t covered and then pay for that non existent extra insurance. Just seems that it’s easy to prompt for extra cash, not so easy to advise don’t spend your money as it’s not worth your while.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Any updates to good couriers.

I want to send a bass worth up to £900 just in the UK, it used to cost £30 with eurosender, and now the cheapest I can find that actually takes a bass (in a hardcase and cardboard) and actually insures is £60.

If that is is, I can't really send and I will have to cancel my ebay sale

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5 hours ago, Woodinblack said:

Any updates to good couriers.

I want to send a bass worth up to £900 just in the UK, it used to cost £30 with eurosender, and now the cheapest I can find that actually takes a bass (in a hardcase and cardboard) and actually insures is £60.

If that is is, I can't really send and I will have to cancel my ebay sale

iI know Ebay have their own postage thing going but how and if it’s in the UK I’m not sure. Sending stuff overseas can be done through Ebay. Check their options? They have a warehouse in East Midlands somewhere that handles their international posting hub.

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6 hours ago, Woodinblack said:

Any updates to good couriers.

I want to send a bass worth up to £900 just in the UK, it used to cost £30 with eurosender, and now the cheapest I can find that actually takes a bass (in a hardcase and cardboard) and actually insures is £60.

If that is is, I can't really send and I will have to cancel my ebay sale

Tread very carefully with couriers at present, they're feeling the pinch and systematically albeit unethically handing it on to customers. I sent a bass to Walshy a while back, and the courier TNT tried to charge me a substantial surcharge for poor packaging. Luckily having been here before I photo every stage of the packing process, so I sent them the photos and notified them that I would sue their flipping derrières off should they choose to test my resolve in the matter. Oddly and almost immediately they discovered that it wasn't my package that had caused offence after all :)

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19 hours ago, mybass said:

iI know Ebay have their own postage thing going but how and if it’s in the UK I’m not sure. Sending stuff overseas can be done through Ebay. Check their options? They have a warehouse in East Midlands somewhere that handles their international posting hub.

It’s just off the a38 near Burton 

there is another in south normanton 

actually run by Pitney bowes 

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On 15/02/2021 at 14:11, Woodinblack said:

Any updates to good couriers.

I want to send a bass worth up to £900 just in the UK, it used to cost £30 with eurosender, and now the cheapest I can find that actually takes a bass (in a hardcase and cardboard) and actually insures is £60.

If that is is, I can't really send and I will have to cancel my ebay sale

I have used APC via Overland express after someone on here recommended them. They have done around 10 or so deliveries for me over the last year and apart form a 2 delay recently - 1 day due to weather and the driver ran out of time the second day - they have been good. And give them their due, they made sure the delayed delivery was done am on the second day.

Its around the £30 mark for insured delivery in the UK. How comprehensive the insurance is I don`t know as I have never had to claim but have a look and see if it suits you.

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On 15/02/2021 at 20:11, mybass said:

iI know Ebay have their own postage thing going but how and if it’s in the UK I’m not sure. Sending stuff overseas can be done through Ebay. Check their options? They have a warehouse in East Midlands somewhere that handles their international posting hub.

They basically make you do click and collect within uk and use eBay GSP if international 

to be fair with their Global shipping program they’ve not lost or damaged anything yet and I send a fair bit of stuff. It’s been slow but always arrived with reasonable tracking.   They got a huge Lego kit c.10kg to western Australia in just 14 elapsed days,  over Xmas, in the middle of a pandemic - that’s a good test I feel 

if anything happens to it, it’s covered by eBay (shrug) what’s not to like ?

Edited by Geek99
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On 15/02/2021 at 14:11, Woodinblack said:

Any updates to good couriers.

I want to send a bass worth up to £900 just in the UK, it used to cost £30 with eurosender, and now the cheapest I can find that actually takes a bass (in a hardcase and cardboard) and actually insures is £60.

If that is is, I can't really send and I will have to cancel my ebay sale

That’s the problem. A bass in a hard case is actually quite a large package in terms of volumetric weight. You’ll get a decent price with UPS (I use their app and go direct as it’s usually cheaper then via Interparcel), but it’s the transit cover that makes it expensive. At least they actually cover musical instruments in a hard case, but only up to £1,000. Why is it a deal-breaker? Can you not split the cost? I’m always upfront that I will only courier a bass with full insurance at cost, if it’s too expensive for the buyer then they don’t get it. Fingers crossed I’ve not had an issue with UPS, but then again every courier can be great until they lose or smash up a parcel...

Edited by FDC484950
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I'm not sure if this has been said before - it probably has , on here at some time or other .

But is the Courier industry , the only industry , where you pay for a service , and then have to take out extra insurance at cost , in case they don't do the job that you've already paid them to do in the first place ?

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24 minutes ago, E sharp said:

But is the Courier industry , the only industry , where you pay for a service , and then have to take out extra insurance at cost , in case they don't do the job that you've already paid them to do in the first place ?

I'm not sticking up for couriers, but the argument is that with millions of parcels sent per day, some will always get lost or be damaged, and they can't operate their business with uncapped liability (suppose they lose your package, and then you claim it was worth £500,000).  That's why they cap it at around £100.

If the liability cap was raised, say to £1000, prices would go up for everyone (to cover the increased liability) and so they'd lose a lot of their customers for not being competitive (because people sending £100 packages don't want to pay for £1000 of cover; and there are a lot more people sending £100 packages than £1000 packages).

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9 hours ago, FDC484950 said:

You’ll get a decent price with UPS (I use their app and go direct as it’s usually cheaper then via Interparcel), but it’s the transit cover that makes it expensive. At least they actually cover musical instruments in a hard case, but only up to £1,000. Why is it a deal-breaker? Can you not split the cost? 

In the end I got a good price with UPS through their own site, it was much more expensive through interparcel when I added the insurance. 

The reason it was a deal breaker was because the advert was back from before brexit when it would cost £30 to ship, so that was what was in the advert and already paid for. Now most places cost double that (which seems a little odd as this is the same uk-uk requirement as before) and I had already gone down as much as I wanted to go. That used to be through eurosender who used DPD. DPD through any other means was £50.

In future adverts I will just have to increase the shipping, which means less likely to sell.

Edited by Woodinblack
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I was having this very conversation yesterday with the guy that does my tech stuff.  He also makes guitars and ships them out all over then country.  He says he researched it all as thoroughly as he could because, with all the other plates he keeps spinning, each guitar takes 3 months to build and he doesn't want to have to keep on re-making broken ones.  He ended up using UPS and has never had an issue, costs him £50/60 fully insured.

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22 minutes ago, Paul S said:

I was having this very conversation yesterday with the guy that does my tech stuff.  He also makes guitars and ships them out all over then country.  He says he researched it all as thoroughly as he could because, with all the other plates he keeps spinning, each guitar takes 3 months to build and he doesn't want to have to keep on re-making broken ones.  He ended up using UPS and has never had an issue, costs him £50/60 fully insured.

£60 to courier a Yamaha bass, you've sold for £175, will probably kill the sale. I used to be able to ship basses for £20. It looks like those days are well and truly over and if I want to sell a sub £200 bass, I will have to sell it to my next door neighbour or do as Norman Tebbit once suggested, get on my bike and deliver it myself

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1 hour ago, MoJo said:

£60 to courier a Yamaha bass, you've sold for £175, will probably kill the sale. I used to be able to ship basses for £20. It looks like those days are well and truly over and if I want to sell a sub £200 bass, I will have to sell it to my next door neighbour or do as Norman Tebbit once suggested, get on my bike and deliver it myself

It is a shame. Hopefully if the world gets back to normal there will be less courier take up, and maybe the prices might go down again. At the moment for most things it isn't worth the effort. Not so bad if you are prepared to take the chance, but I wasn't on this. Maybe on a £100 bass it is ok as they cover to that, or hermes do to £300 (although you would need it with them), although not beyond a metre.

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2 minutes ago, yorks5stringer said:

Just seen this in Private Eye, written by an Amazon Driver, think it gives a perspective from the drivers viewpoint...

Scan 5.pdf 4.05 MB · 2 downloads

Oh having talked to a lot of van drivers the job is horrible and I have admiration for the fact that they do it.

I have nothing against couriers. I do have something against courier companies though!

On the plus side, my £28.50 UPS delivery insured for £900 got to where it was going a day early and the customer is happy. So yay for parts of UPS (except in this case the courier)!

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2 minutes ago, Woodinblack said:

On the plus side, my £28.50 UPS delivery insured for £900 

It really p1sses me off that you have to pay insurance for courier to do their job properly.

Would you get a tradesman in and be presented with the option of "do you want us to build this wall... and do you want to pay extra to insure... just incase we put a shovel through your window and accidentally drive into your house?"

It's ludicrous isn't it? 

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