I’m looking for some advice on shipping cards. This community was a great help a couple years back with getting my cards PSA graded but in the few days I plan to list my shadowless 1st edition base set for sale (PSA grades on holos, avg 8. Charizard 8; Non-holos similar quality).
I haven’t entirely settled on a price (not why I’m here) but am having to process if the set sold for $10k+, what’s the best way to ship them? My current thought is taking the lot of them to UPS, paying them to package them, then insuring them to value and doing an expedited shipping. But would high value insuring them be a bad idea? Does anyone have any advice on how to handle this? My wife and I got married and bought a house last year so I’m hoping selling these can help cushion our savings since, as you might imagine, paying for both of those hits the savings a bit.
If domestic then I’d say USPS registered mail insured for full value. I’ve shipped $50k packages for about $70. It’s a bit slower but the security is unmatched.
If international then I have no idea but I had a ~$2k DHL package from Buyee somehow come to me next day from Japan and it only cost me $60 in shipping.
I’m looking to ship primarily domestic. I hadn’t considered USPS as being better security, why is that? I was considering UPS just for the peace of mind and having a bias towards UPS (probably just because of the UPS people that deliver to our office). But they’ve generally always been timely and I’ve recently had USPS packages and mail run slower. Which with something like this would eat at my sanity.
USPS registered mail has a secure chain of custody with sign offs every time the package changes hands. Packages are locked up in safes in usps buildings and locked in boxes in the trucks. I’ve never heard of one being lost and they allow insurance up to $50k at least if not more. They require tamper proof tape sealing of all the seams and stamp them at every seam.
I’ve wondered what they do if/when they inspect them randomly though. Seems like they must not really do that too often.
I guess what spooked me today about them was flipping through the forum and seeing someone mention Leonheart losing his $55k Charizard to USPS recently.
Edit: Looking specifically into registered mail, I see what you’re talking about. That might not be a bad idea for this.
I’ve never heard of one being lost and not paying out the insurance value either. Which to the seller an insurance payout would make them whole anyways. The buyer would get their money back but not get the card in that instance though.
The issue is when the person on the recieving end signs for the package and they then claim they don’t have it. Otherwise, it’s a safe ship method if nobody screws up like that.
@cullers that is quite the situation then. Easy enough “tough luck” when the signer is the actual final recipient. I guess it’s tougher if/when it’s a middleman service.