Preferably only answers from people who have had experience (or knowledge from a seller) with selling via GSP in the past year. GSP has been around awhile and things change over time, therefore I want recent knowledge.
I live in the US and for now I’m using Ebay’s Global Shipping Program to ship internationally.
I noticed there is an option for GSP to disregard your account’s country-blacklist and ship to all countries.
If you make sure every package safely arrives to the GSP address in Kentucky, why should you care about not shipping to certain countries?
Trade embargos comes to mind. Also, more risk shipping to countries that are not run as well. Example, if I ship to Japan, they have a good tracking system and I am confident it will be delivered. Now imagine shipping to Afghanistan. Most likely your cards will be in the hands of the Taliban instead of the customer, and now you must refund the ebay sale.
GSP does not protect you 100%, is the simplest way i can put it.
therefore, it is good to have some basic understanding of the countries you allow GSP to deliver to. from personal experience, most western countries, australia, japan, canada and the like all have pretty decent postal systems where you can reasonably count on. shipping to india, for example, can be difficult, as their postal system is very different and customs can take a long time and the charges can be massive, which add a layer of complexity to international shipping.
lastly, some countries have historically bad reputation for producing bad experiences for western market sellers for a variety of reasons. this last point is a bit tricky because it comes off as a bias, so it’s up to you to make the judgment on what your level of risk is.
