shipping outside the u.s.

You just need to fill out a customs form. You have to list the contents, fill out the addresses again, and sign and date. thats it. You dont have to open the box or anything like that. The only difference is the customs form… and I think you have to actually go to the post office to mail it instead of the curbside service that some sellers have.

Whatever you do, try never to ship anything USPS outside the US. I mean if you have to, you have to, but I find the USPS unreliable. Spend the extra money to ship UPS, DHL, or Fed Ex. I have had nothing but grief from the US post office in overseas cases and I never use them for even paper documents overseas anymore.

Insurance becomes a heavy issue because if you put insurance on a piece that say, sells for $100 on Ebay and the buyer is from Canada, and you put on $100 worth of insurance, that will become a duty fee that the buyer of the piece will need to pay. I once sold an emerald fledgeling for $50 and put $50 insurance on it, and the buyer contacted me with great anger that she’d have to pay $25 for the duty fee…50% of what the insurance rate was placed on the dragon. In the end we split the fee. Duties always seem to change and other countries can do whatever they want, charge what they want duty-wise on something that has insurance. Once a package ships outside the US you kinda just have to pray it all goes well. Most of the time it does, but sometimes there can be trouble. I won’t go into some of my bad experiences but now I don’t put insurance on anything unless the buyer requests it and they understand the duty fees THEY may incur by so doing. It can be a touchy issue.

Also, you may have to fill out anywhere from 1-3 forms. Different postal offices have different things but the main form is the customs form, which is no biggie…you just fill out what the item is. Also, a BIG help to avoid duty fees and the like is to list it as a birthday gift because somrtimes if you say “fine art sculpture” or something and the customs agent looks in the box (especially shipping to Mexico), they can say, hey, I think this is worth more than the worth you specified on your customs form and will charge a duty on it. It’s curropt but there’s nothing you can do so try to svoid saying it’s artwork. Just say painted sculpture or painted dragon figure, etc. Dumb down what it is.

Another problem I have run into is that even with placing insurance on something, you will need to proove its value. With artwork this is difficult but since you’re selling over Ebay this becomes much more easy to claim true worth. Print out and keep the ebay receipts! If the sculpture gets damaged and you have insurance on it this will proove that you got X dollars for it. Otherwise you’re screwed. Trust me, I sold paintings and clay and other artworks before off-ebay and couldn’t proove anything in such cases and even with insurance I got nothing back and had to re-imburse the buyer, thereby loosing money off a sale!

I don’t say any of this to scare you but be prepared as a serious seller to come across various shipping issues when going overseas. It’s a gamble. I fear it myself. Maybe others have had far better experiences than me but I do about 75% of my overall business overseas and it’s always an issue for me.

It’s really not as big of a deal as people say, I just hate it sometimes with ebay because I’ve had packages wanering around the country or just stuck in customs for up to a month and if the person you are selling something to isn’t understanding it can get ugly. 99% of the time it’s just like shipping to the US, but you have more forms to fill out and it takes a little longer.

Adding my voice to dragonmedley’s: I’m in Canada and I absolutely always request USPS for shipping because of the 40% brokerage fee I’d have to pay with private courrier companies (UPS, Fed Ex and so on). I do always request insurance for the full value and yes, I get to pay 14% taxes when I get the item, but I’d have to pay taxes if I bought it in a store here anyways, so I don’t mind so much. But 40% brokerage fee is definitely too high, for example, on my flame POW if I had used UPS, I would have had to pay a $138 brokerage fee to UPS + the 14% taxes!

So yes, in my opinion, USPS is better for shipping over the border (I don’t know about overseas though) and I’ve never had a problem with them.

One other thing… You should always ship with a service that provides tracking numbers, that way, the buyer can’t say he never got the item. I learned this one the hard way!

I don’t know if USPS offers tracking on ALL services, but they do offer it on USPS Airmail Parcel Post, and the fun thing is that USPS and Canada Post tracking numbers are usable on either website, meaning that I can use my Canada Post tracking number on http://www.usps.com and vice-versa.

Lots of good thoughts to you and your Mom, tf…