A Merry Christmas to everyone..

I'm hoping to sell a couple of watches in the new year circa £6500 each. I really only want to sell them to a mainland UK buyer as I've no experience with international shipping and would be interested to know what courier service and insurance other UK sellers use.

Cheers

 

Royal Mail insures up to £10,000 on their signed for service with a £10 surcharge (£9.xx in fact, but I don't remember exactly). Shipping jewellery or watches valued at over £2500 outside the UK is nigh on impossible with full insurance.

 

Not exactly. I use parcel pro for insurance with intl shipments from UK and within UK RMSD

 

When did you last use them? Their UK website has gone with only the option to email enquiries ... none of mine even being answered!

 

For the U.K. I use RMSD up to £3000. For all other and international, I use UPS - there are lots of drop off points, you can specify delivery only to nominated address (ie no redirect), fully tracked, fully insured, and signed for by an adult and you can easily print everything off at home. They have a good range of services and price points including express. I’ve used them for shipment to the US, Far East and Europe, they are perhaps a little more expensive but I’ve never had a problem....

 

Not in a while but just logged in and I can still report shipments from the UK, though RMSD is no longer an option, only DHL, UPS, and Fedex now.

 

Perhaps because you have an existing account? Possibly because the item I wanted to send was of particularly high value? I was fortunate enough to be able to use the OF underground.

 

I wasn't aware RM Special Delivery offer insurance up to £10,000, I thought it was only £2,500?

For anything substantially higher than £2,500 within the U.K. and fir all international postage I use ParcelPro with UPS. I set my account up this summer without issue.

 

Yes those of you suggesting there is a RM Service above £2,500, can you post a link since I know of nothing above this which insures watches and/or jewellery and would be very interested to hear more info. Parcelforce may offer more but don't AFAIK cover these items.

I have used IFS inforsure to insure higher value shipments with success this year. That said I didn’t need to claim which I guess is the acid test.

 

RMSD is only up to £2500 and if you send something with a higher value they are entitled to not pay anything at all if it gets lost. The way they explained it to me is that they will not cover watches above £2500 and the £10000 level is just for consequential loss cover so it's designed for (say) a document that goes missing and you incur some costs up to that £10000.

I have to be able to post outgoing watches back after service as well as give customers an option for incoming. The watches can be outside of that value so, I use Royal Mail with Inforsure. Inforsure charge 0.25% of the insured value and will cover UK and international shipments with Royal Mail (plus the big courier services but they tend to be significantly more expensive).

Services Inforsure cover (with Royal Mail): RMSD; International Tracked and Signed; Express; Priority (Parcelforce).

When you think about it, they are covering the courier (in this case RM) so, there is no concern that you are pretending to send a watch and it's a brick (for example). You declare the package value and if it goes missing then they should pay you that amount. Once signed for, it is outside of their interest.

Cheers, Chris

 

Well we live on a small island with a decent rail and motorway system We can drive to most places in a few hours or so. A couple of deals worth a total of £13,000 would be enough for me to deliver the watches by hand.

 

I sent watches just last week with a conservative value of £10000 via Royal Mail. As others have said, their standard service covers jewellery up to a value of £2500. Asking at the counter about additional insurance - and being perfectly open that the packages contained watches - I was given the option to purchase additional cover up to £10,000 at the counter. This was all done with the sub-post mistress at my local post office. She is pretty good with these things. Like most who have run a post office for most of their lives, they know the regulations inside and out. I'll dig out the receipts later to check the name of the service.

 

Please do. As mentioned above I fear what you may have purchased is consequential loss cover. That doesn’t insure against the loss of the object Itself so i suspect you weren’t actually covered. Would love to be proven wrong on this though!

 

The problem with RM is that they tell you different things depending on who you speak to. My Post Master and the RM help line were very clear that it is £2500 max cover. I had to spend some time on this as I need it a lot and wasn't willing to risk losing out. I can't see the 1pm conditions but here are the latest 9am RMSD conditions:


You'll see compensation up to £2500 by paying extra and a separate area for consequential loss up to £10000. From the RM website here:

Can I buy consequential loss coverage?
Sometimes the damage, delay or loss of an item can lead to greater loss than the actual value of the item itself. For such items you can buy our consequential loss cover of up to £10,000. This cover could be a wise choice for important legal documents or tax returns that may result in penalties if lost or not delivered on time. Just ask for consequential loss when you send your item by Special Delivery Guaranteed™. Make your compensation claims through our Customer Services within 14 days of posting. You’ll need to include the receipt for purchase in order to file the claim.

However, if your post mistress is sure that you are able to purchase £10000 worth of actual cover then that's fine, I'm just saying what I found out from going into depth with this.

Cheers, Chris

 

I guess from the replies I will have to advertise as collection only.

Thanks to those who replied.

 

Guys, sorry for the long delay in replying. I did dig out the postage receipts but have been ridiculously busy and forgot all about them. The receipt shows the insurance line as "CLoss" and I can only assume that is Consequential Loss as @padders and others have said above ... seems the postmistress was mistaken and there really is no way to insure items above £2500.