An interesting twist on insured sales

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Posted By: warshawlaw

A person certainly can guarantee receipt or your money back. A person also can purchase private insurance on an item that covers business inventory lost in transit to a customer. Neither of these things happened. The seller did not tell me that he was pocketing my $1.10 and therefore guaranteeing my receipt of the item; if he had, my response would have been to refuse the "insurance" because I have no idea if he will pay off if the thing is lost (I have no idea if he will even ship it, for that matter). Insurance is supposed to be a third party thing. It also forces the seller to get a receipt proving the item was shipped out. Now, if the seller is passing on a business protection he has to me, that raises a number of issues, not the least of which is how he calculated the rate he was charging me. The item was modestly priced, so that the insurance charged was nearly 10% of the purchase price, which I signed on for only because I am close to finishing the particular set involved and I needed this common badly and wanted to make sure that the card was shipped.

I feel like I got jacked on this deal because I was charged a fee that was just about the same as the post office fee, there was no indicating that this "insurance" was not the post office standard insurance, and based on the statement that the seller simply made note of the insurance in his ledger, I am under the distinct impression that this seller simply pocketed the insurance money with the plan that if he gets caught with an undelivered item, he will refund the money. Of course, this offers no protection for the buyer unless the buyer has recourse through a payment mechanism (e.g., a Paypal complaint to screw up his account and force proof of shipment with insurance). Otherwise, there is nothing to force the seller to live up to the "insurance" and refund the payment. About all that will result in is a trade of negative feedback (and we all know how effective those are). In the meantime, the seller makes a tidy little profit on the bogus "insurance", doesn't he?