2 Jul
2024
2 Jul
'24
9:32 p.m.
On Tue, Jul 2, 2024 at 2:10 PM Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Postal rates between countries have long be determined by treaty. Used
to be the IPU (International Postal Union), but is now the UPU
(Universal Postal Union), which is an agency within the UN. The general
idea is for postal rates to be independent of politics.
Previous US president forced a re-eval of this. Which is why now if you
buy from AliExpress it's all third party shipper with sometimes USPS only
handling the last mile.
It used to all be China Post but the US was getting a horrid deal.
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/19/17996378/trump-china-universal-postal-union-…
By default, eBay US listings since last year have eBay
International
Shipping (eIS) enabled. Any international sale goes to a US eBay depot,
which forwards the item to the customer, and handles customs documentation.
*All returns are handled by eBay and not paid by the seller.* While some
categories are excluded from eIS, there is absolutely positively no reason
for US sellers to not sell abroad the majority of categories with it.
Under the old Global Shipping Program there were still some odd cases where
a seller could be hit with a SNAD claim but under the new EIS it's
basically impossible. eBay just eats it in all cases. Of course you'll
get barred from the program if you have too many returns or other negative
stats. Under the GSP I had a case where an item of mine got
"lost", everyone was made whole and the item appeared again from a
different seller (who'd bought it from an auction) and he just used my same
photos. Funny.