Delivery Confirmation / Tracking

Ah, the ever-complicated topic of delivery confirmation and tracking. I'll abbreviate these as DCT, so you'll know to what I am referring. 

Just like insurance, DCT is pretty much unofficially-mandatory. Here's why:

If you sell an item, let's say, a $100 vase, you might do everything right, pack it adequately, apply a neatly-addressed label, proper postage and insurance, but no DCT, and the package never arrives, who is responsible?

If you guessed the buyer, you are wrong. If you guessed the carrier, you are wrong. You, the seller are ultimately responsible for ALL items until they are in the hands of your buyer. 

So, if you ship your $100 vase, and it arrives intact, and the buyer opens up the package, inspects it, finds it to be all nice and pretty, and notices you failed to add delivery confirmation for 19 cents, do you think your buyer will not try to email you and say, "Where is my vase? It never arrived."

How would you know whether it arrived or not? You shipped it. You remember shipping it and giving it to the mail lady as she made her rounds last Thursday in that smelly USPS jeep-like van. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is whether the recipient ever received it?

You will NEVER know unless you include DCT. DCT is not mandatory. Sure, you can shave a few cents off your shipping and pocket that savings, but you will NEVER KNOW IF YOUR ITEMS EVER ARRIVE AT THEIR DESTINATION. All an unscrupulous buyer would need to do is email ebay and say, "Um, item # 13048264756264 never arrived. I need a full refund." Ebay and paypal will ask you to provide proof that it arrived. Your DCT number is the only way to prove that it ever arrived. Without that DCT proof, your item is as good as gone with an unscrupulous buyer, and be prepared to give the buyer a full refund.

Now, international shipping is a lot trickier. In most cases, the ONLY countries which provide US sellers with delivery confirmation are Canada and the UK. I can't quite figure this one out. In this digital era, neither Germany, Japan, nor any any other country besides Canada and the UK have managed to get their systems in sync with outs and deliver real-time confirmation of delivery of items.

As a result, I refuse to ship ANYTHING to ANY country other than within the US, or to Canada or the UK. Sorry to everyone else. If I shipped something to a buyer in ANY other country other than Canada or the UK, all the buyer would need to do is tell ebay the item never arrived and I'd be forced to issue a 100% refund. 

Now, the one exception to this rule is shipping by the often-prohibitively-expensive GEM option: Global Express Mail. GEM is, as you can guess, exorbitantly expensive, but often provides for DCT. But, are you willing to rely on GEM DCT to some God-forsaken place like Mongolia? I wouldn't. France, Germany, Japan, yes, as well as to the rest of Europe and some of Asia- those countries most likely to have systems in place to track a GEM package.

I can count on one hand the number of buyers who have requested GEM shipping since 1997. Few outside-the-US buyers are going to opt for it considering it costs so much.

Otherwise, you're pretty much at Gods good mercy.