eBay Business All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3: Insuring Your Item's Delivery

In This Chapter

• Knowing your insurance options
• Addressing your packages correctly
• Filing a claim with the major carriers

This chapter reveals the practical link between insurance and timely delivery — and how the wise seller can use both to ensure a better experience for both buyer and seller. The key is an assumption: When someone buys an item from you, the buyer assumes that the item will be shipped in 24 to 48 hours (customers prefer a quick 24-hour turnaround). A little-known rule of the online world is the Federal Trade Commission's 30-day mail-order rule that applies to all online sales, as well as to mail-order businesses.

Unless you (as the seller) state a specific shipping time, all items must be shipped within 30 days.

Adopted in 1975, this FTC rule proclaims these buyer's rights:

• The buyer must receive the merchandise when the seller says it will arrive, or earlier.
• If delivery is not promised within a certain time period, the seller must ship the merchandise to the buyer no later than 30 days after receiving the order.
• If the buyer doesn't receive the merchandise within that 30-day period, the buyer can cancel the order and get his or her money back.

This rule must be part of the reason why eBay won't allow items on the site for presale (or drop-shipping, detailed in Book IV, Chapter 4) unless you can guarantee that the ...