So I recently sold a Shiny Charizard I pulled from Hidden Fates on Ebay for over $400 and shipped it without insurance and experienced no problems. I also recently purchased two cards both around $200 and saw that both sellers put insurance on those shipments. It made me realize I may have been too careless with not insuring my Charizard when I sent it, but I understand if you continually insure your shipments you will continually decrease your profit margins. Can anyone advise a solid base price that you should start insuring your sales on? Like if it’s over $100 or $200 etc. What prices do you guys normally start insuring your shipments? I know this will be all personal preference, but just kind of looking for a feel of what experienced sellers practice.
like 2 grand or if shipping overseas
If it’s a couple hundred OVERSEAS, I always insure. When it starts hitting close to $300 to $500, I insure as a general practice. I’ve only made a couple of exceptions and that’s when I know who I am shipping to if it’s like a private sale or close by.
Is it an amount of money I’m comfortable losing?
No: insure it
Yes: dont insure it / partially insure it
I’ve never insured an item, over 1k items sold on ebay and even more privately. Never had a lost or damaged package. I feel like buying insurance is a form of gambling - not sure if that’s irrational and my brains way of justifying being a tight ass lol.
I insure items anything $100 or more. After hurricane Harvey, a large chunk of my mail for two weeks went MIA both mail I sent and was receiving so after that I insure out of abundance of caution.
I’m not a store. I’m a casual seller either selling off extras or cards I can’t for the life of me figure out why I purchased it since it doesn’t fit into my collection. I also live in a disaster prone region. Post office gets flooded once a month lol.
Insurance is a profitable business. Like anything else in life self insure on anything you can and only insure where there is:
- wipeout risk (homeowners w/ liability for most, TERM life insurance)
- a legal requirement (auto w/ liability, etc.) or
- risk great enough to make you lose sleep and/or quality of life over (high $ shipments, also auto, high $ collections, etc.)
Everyone needs to set their own thresholds for the above. Me personally I ship priority mail (which includes $50 insurance) on sales over $250, signature required over $750 (as required for seller protection), and only start insuring items around $5,000 generally.
If I insured say every single $200 shipment I would spend hundreds or thousands per year on insurance fees alone. Sure it sucks to lose $200 in one go, but when taken as part of the greater picture one would almost always come out ahead self insuring for any given $ amount if they have high enough volume.
E.g. someone who sells ~$1,000 in items per year may insure everything over $100 as that represents 10% of their total gross and it may only be one item per year while someone who sells $1,000,000 per year may only insure things over $50,000 or $100,000 for the same reasons.
My insurance is shipping procedure.
I do offer the option to insure when buyers request, but in general I dont. I have done a few packages but things can get complicated if you have something really high end.
As sort of mentioned, it depends on how much you are willing to lose. As a casual seller, I think of it like this: If I lose a $100 sale how many sales then have to be made to recover that cost. This is how business’ determine what is an “appropriate” amount of loss meaning how much of their resources go into negating said loss. If you make 100 and lose 100 thats bad, if you make 10,000 and lose 100 thats not so bad.
My biz insurance covers all usps insurance up to $5000 it pays for itself if you ship a lot never have to worry.
Insurance for Auspost is a scam they will automatically cover loses up to $100 on all tracked items, so even if they lose a $300 item you get 30% back and it happens so rarely it is never worth it.
I don’t sell all that much, but I buy a lot. I’ve only ever had one package get “lost” and thankfully it was only worth $30. I live off the road a ways and the USPS system said they delivered it on my front porch, but they never did. They wouldn’t refund me because “they delivered it”. I hate the USPS but 1/1000+ isn’t too bad.
I recently shipped over 30 packages through USPS to several States and didnt insure any of them; no issues at all.