Looking for a recommendation for 3P shipping insurance. We do not use Amazon shipping.
Shipsurance is a pain to get claims and now we are having integration issues
UPS Cargo Insurance was great but our yearly claims didn’t even cover 1/3 of the cost.
Thoughts?
You will find that over time insurance claims will not even come close to covering the cost of the insurance.
This is how insurance companies stay in business.
In my 10 years of selling online and when using USPS Priority mail where insurance is already included I have actually had to file and collected 3 times and this is after sending tens of thousands of these packages.
Insurance is almost never worth the cost involved unless a very valuable and fragile item.
You should set a bottom line for how much of a product cost you can bear. I only insure above $50 value and will sometimes ship priority for the $50 insurance with USPS.
I agree that self insurance makes the most sense. I have evaluated the issue annually over two decades of online selling and the arithmetic does not lie. Not a single year of that time period resulted in purchasing insurance being a financial plus.
U-Pic is your best third party insurance option. Claims are handled reasonably quickly and the claims process is pretty simple. My experience with the staff at U-Pic has been consistently outstanding. Contrast that with your interactions with Amazon seller support.
I know you stated that you do not utilize the Amazon shipping service. The U-Pic insurance offered through that platform is a fraction of the very reasonable rate I pay for U-Pic insurance for shipping labels generated with Endicia. The Amazon rates are .30 for $50 or .40 per $100.
I repeat that even with those low rates self insurance is the way to go.
Edited by: alovesupreme on Sep 8, 2017 7:12 PM
Edited by: alovesupreme on Sep 8, 2017 7:13 PM
That is what we are doing now. Before we were insuring everything because it was either blanket coverage or simply because that’s how it was initially setup. We do sell some pricier items and we wanted to protect ourselves against the fraud/damage on those. But most of the claims are on like $20 items. We added those claims up for the past couple years and it was nowhere’s near our insurance bills. So now we have set a guideline based on either the category or price total.
We were looking at some other alternate companies
We ship USPS Priority Mail & USPS which includes $100 of coverage. Above the $100 we self-insure.
Our claims are about nil so it doesn’t warrant buying coverage above the $100 for these carriers.
If you ship USPS, UPS, Fed Ex, etc. you can buy extra ( above the $100 mark ) insurance when you purchase the shipping label. You should do a cost vs. benefit analysis if using these carriers. Unless you are shipping fragile, highly valuable items, I doubt buying extra insurance is worth the cost.
If shipping via common carrier, motor freight, etc. and have an excessive amount of claims, I’d consider switching carriers.
I never buy insurance. Items damaged in transit means your packaging is sub standard. Since I use plenty of void fill, I rarely get these sort of claims.
The other big thing for some is INR, and the insurance companies won’t cover that as tracking says “delivered”.
Then there is Package Lost, that they’ll pay for. However, VERY FEW of my packages get lost. Perhaps 1 out of many thousand packages. Almost all of my stuff ships USPS that everybody likes to pound on…but they do very well IMO. Also use UPS and they do a good job also.
If you were to get more in claims than you paid for the insurance, the insurance company would no longer be in business. If you did legitimately get a higher return, the insurance company would eventually deny your coverage and would not allow you to buy from them.
We are on the opposite end: We try to negotiate our shipping contracts to not have insurance. Up to now, we have not been successful as it’s a large income stream for the couriers.
I know of one company who has a UPS contract that does not include insurance. They were able to negotiate insurance out of the contract because of their volume.
If needed I buy U-PIC insurance through Endicia as a reasonable cost. I also generally only insured if the price is over $50 and I can’t replace what is in the order. I have had to make a few claims and U-PIC paid out for a lost UK order as well as one in Spain and another Italy one. I now no longer will ship to Spain and Italy due to the troubles I had. If I can I will self-insure but unfortunately at times there is no funds in the kitty, so I am insuring for 80 cents maybe to be sure I don’t lose my grocery money. I rarely have had to turn in claims but was very happy that I had it when I needed to.
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