High value item & PO Box address

[mzplcg]

HI

Can anyone help please? I've just sold an item on EBAY and the buyer paid by PAYPAL. It was over £500 and the confirmed address which Paypal are telling me to ship to has no real name (User's EBAY ID) and also a PO Box address.

The Royal Mail have confirmed they will accept it via Special Delivery but that it might not necessarily be the actual buyer who signs for it. Not sure why Paypal allow this kind of thing either. Surely a confirmed address is a real one with a real person's name.

I am not comfortable with this so am not shipping until I know for sure.

Thanks in advance.

[red-bay · Accepted solution]

It's over £150 so the requirements are different. Special delivery would cover you for seller protection providing you ship to the address on the paypal payment page within seven days, and a signature is viewable online that proves delivery. Theres nothing suspicious about people using po boxes. If its a toyal mail po box, the address is safer than a street address because the royal mail verify the identity of the people they rent po boxes to

[red-bay]

If you want further advice on this one, I've to think asking on the ebay forum would be helpful http://forums.ebay.co.uk/forum.jspa?forumID=7

[mzplcg]

Thanks for this. I ended up calling Royal Mail and they are happy to provide the details behind a PO Box in the event of a problem. Also, I discovered their "Special Delivery Next Day" service includes £500 of insurance which would cover me in the event they could not provide the name & address of the person signing.

In other words, it appears to be safe as long as you use the details provided by Paypal. I also called Paypal who said I should only ship to verified addresses and all I had to do was prove it was delivered to that address.

[red-bay]

Aye, that's pretty much it. The time to be cautious with po boxes is if they're not Royal Mail issued because they're a lot harder to get any information about the person responsible for the box

You can identify non royal mail po boxes by the prefix, only royal mail are allowed to use the term p.o box, mailing address companies use glamorous names like "suite 27" Dont forget to ship within seven days, but, for an item of that value shipping on day three or four makes sense