Overseas Shipment Lost, What now?

I am just looking for some opinions here.

I shipped a $400 item to another respected A-marter in Italy. Insurance was not discussed and the item was shipped uninsured. It has been 2 months and he states he has not received the box. Obviously, I have no way to verify this except his good rating on A-mart.

What would you do at this point?

1) Refund his entire purchse price
2) Split the cost of the loss
3) Tell him, sorry Charlie
4) Something better than the above?

Thanks,

Steve

The package was shipped by USPS so there is no tracking number.

Is it the buyers responsibility to ask for insurance?

How long do you wait before refunding the money? This is a real bummer and yes, $6.40 would have made this a non-issue.

Steve,
I did the search request thing myself once. It actually kind of the reverse of tracking. Tracking an item is where it is scanned at each stop and recorded. With a search it only tells you where it isn't. It gets routed through the same path the package should (and should is the keyword here) have gone. If the item is damaged or missing vital info from it's label it gets stopped at a post office and hopefully the tracking will find it. The postal inspector though told me thousands of items go astray each week so don't hold my breath.

Give it time.

Tony

Steve,

I would wait it out for a bit. My son was stationed in Italy for 4-years. We always mailed packages to him via USPS.Before his return trip home we mailed his airline ticket to him. Three months later he had still not received it. We went to the post office and had them check into it. The claimed that they could not figure out where it had gone to and said that we were out of luck. The packaged had been insured. The funny thing is that within 2-days the ticket arrived there.

Be patient!

Jared

Steve
I had a similar problem a couple of years back. A pair of expensive binoculars from an ebay tranaction went missing. From Italy.

The tracking found they had been delivered to a wrong address. The cause was the fact the half-witted delivery man was confused by continental 7's and 1's.

An elderly lady received the parcel, unwrapped it and then put oily fingers all over the lenses and binoculars before just letting it sit. Eventually she contacted the post office.

By now I was complaining and had the seller track it too.

The post office recovered them for me and now my twin uses them for going to race meetings!!!

If I remember rightly the postage from Italy was rather expensive but becuase it was insured and tracked I came out all right.

Best wishes

Kevin