So, a few weeks ago - close to a month now - I got a message about a game I sold, Half-Life on the PC, I sold it for €7, and the postage was standard at €6.50 to Romania.
They contacted me last week and asked if I had a tracking number, since their item didn't arrive. Instantly I thought, "oh no," and just said to them that this time of year things can be slower. They were fairly easy going if I'm honest, but enevatibly, today I got a request on eBay, which I just refunded instantly just to be done with it.
It's Annoying
While all this was going on I got a sale for Spain, and it was another game that was set for standard delivery. The account was something like two days old and I was like, "yeah right," so I canceled the order, told them the postage price was wrong. Then I went through every post I had up for standard and changed the prices for registered.
The buyer was annoyed at me, and complained about having to pay an extra €6 and said that there are cheaper people out there, so I wish them well and left them to their hunt.
I don't care anymore, I'd rather keep the stuff I'm selling rather than giving it away for free.
I've sold a handful of items standard and received no issues, but this one just bugged me and made me make the jump to doing everything with registered post. It's just not worth it, and also, one thing I've learned since doing the eBay selling is, everything will sell eventually, so I'm not too worried.
I've sold two things to Romania and both of them have had issues that literally made me want to just block the whole country.
I sold Resident Evil 2 for the PS1 to someone and six days later - including the weekend - they contacted me complaining about how long it was taking (it had been 4 working days and they expected it to get from Ireland to Romania sooner than that)
They were clearly trying to scam me. I told them to look at the tracking, as it literally said it was in Romania and I said it should arrive in a day or two. They opened a case, tried to get a refund, the following day it arrived and eBay closed the case.
I'm not going to block the whole country, obviously, but there's no way I'll be sending there - or anywhere else for that matter - without tracking.
Expensive Postage Costs
If it wasn't for people like this, we could freely ship standard and get and give much better deals, but sadly we can't. Really, there should be some sort of rule put in that if a buyer wants a refund they literally need to get written confirmation from their postman to state that they don't recall delivering a package, or envelope to their home.
That being the case would make it much harder for people to rip off sellers, and would result in the vast majority of people being able to get better postage rates.