Cels Forum

Yes, mostly it is the buyer who is unprotected, but there
are some risks for the seller as well. There is always the
buyer who is quick to leave negative feedback (on Ebay) or
to slander a seller's name with the argument: "Such-and-so
took my money and didn't send my item!" When in fact their
money really never did arrive, but they don't believe you.

Then there are sellers who simply don't want the bother of
dealing with some postal systems. We, as collectors of
anime cels, are blessed with the fact that Japan has a
wonderful postal system (as does the US, all "snail-mail"
jokes aside). But I do lots of dealing with Singapore for
my Asian Hard Rock Cafe pins, and I can tell you I grit my
teeth every time I have to do it. You need to jump
backflips though hoops of fire to get anything through. A
seller who accepts a bid from someone in a country that
doesn't have a good postal system can wind up waiting a
long time to receive payment if something gets lost or
misdirected. It's not buyer friendly to NOT give someone
time to figure out what happened to a payment that they
dutifully sent. And in that time, the seller sits and waits
and waits and waits. . .

This doesn't even touch the problem of figuring out how to
accept certain forms of payment from people in foreign
countries. Foreign forms of payment may be old hat to
someone who does a lot of foreign selling, but many new
sellers (or people who don't sell much) don't want to take
the time that I'm sure it must take to initially figure
this out.

Many Sharp Smiles,
--Drac