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Hey all,
hope you're having a wonderful weekend. For those established sellers on Ebay what are your thoughts on selling items in Puerto Rico. I've been doing some searching after getting burned on a sale down there and came to find that there have been multiple complaints of ebay scams in the area. Has anyone else been scammed down there? Is it worth selling items there? Thanks!
There is a high rate of buyer fraud in that state / territory / country .
My own personal experience has not been a good one when shipping down there :(
I've got around 13 years and thousands of transactions on ebay including lots to Puerto Rico. Have had only good experiences myself, or at least no bad ones that I recall lol
Puerto Rico is about 50/50 in my experience. Half legitimate buyers and half scammers. Hate to group a U.S. territory in the negative category, but it is one of those sad but true realities.
Ultimately it depends on the type of product you are selling. I have been selling on ebay for a decade now and have a high volume of sales to PR. I can't remember anytime that I have had any issue with any buyers. I have had more problems selling into Canada then to PR. Like I said, it depends on the niche. I read other ebay forums with people complaining about fraud all the time. Those people typically are selling higher dollar electronics and such and typically (as a seller) don't have much experience under their belt, especially when it comes to packaging. One of the best things to cut down on fraud is to clearly mark your items and when possible, make sure those markings appear in the listing pictures. I use tamper-proof hologram stickers that are very obvious to notice on the items I sell. This way it is obvious when someone returns the wrong item. Finally, always message the buyer and ask when they return the wrong item. If you do it politely and it was an honest mistake they will fess up to it. 75% of the time when I get the wrong item returned to me it was an honest mistake and is easier to resolve with polite communication. Having the sticker on the item makes it easy for an honest buyer to understand they made a mistake.
I only ship to USA and Japan. (Japan because I know the country and most are very honest) I will not ship to any foreign country and I do consider PR a foreign country. (territory or not) I know some of my items do go to foreign countries but those are bought through freight brokers. I found out about these brokers when I shipped an item to the east coast and the customer claimed he never got it. The end customer was in Europe but contacted me for refund. I called ebay and they told about the address on the east coast. End customer was out of luck because I shipped to broker who did not foreword it. North east coast brokers ship to Europe. Florida brokers ship to Atlantic Islands and Southern Cali brokers ship to Asia, Japan mostly.
I love when people order through freight brokers. I ship the computer to them, and that's the end of that. Especially with all the recent shipping delays, by the time the item makes it to the end user, he's outside of the return window anyways. And if he isn't, just approve the return. He'll never ship it back, because well- shipping a laptop out of Europe, South America, or Asia with a prepaid eBay return label ain't gonna work. I've never been scammed by one of those places yet- in about 10 years of doing this. The scam artists I have to deal with are the bulk CPU buyers on eBay. They'll always try to complain about missing capacitors, even though your CPUs don't have any missing. I just tell them that I mark them with a UV pen for fast and easy returns and open the return up. They never ship anything back. They just want free product.