Hi Andrew,

for many years I have been buying shells from dealers selling their
offerings via the shellauction.net site, including virtually all of the
Chinese dealers, and also "saleseashell" of Rongcai Zhang. The vast majority
of all deals went smoothly, and even the few with initial problems or
misunderstandings eventually were resolved amicably. None of the (few)
problems encountered had anything to do with the shellauction site itself or
the people who run this site. And I have to say that your description of the
problems you experienced doesn't implicate the auction site as the culprit
at all. If you choose to pay by sending cash you are bound to experience
problems in most countries on this planet.... As has been suggested by many,
PayPal is the way to go. I had zero problems when using this route, and I
must say that paying bills in foreign countries cannot be more convenient
than the PayPal way.

Regarding the Chinese dealers and the quality of their shells, on the
shellauction.net there are quite a few excellent and very knowledgeable
dealers with superb material and excellent, reliable service; yhshells is
one that immediately comes to mind, but it is certainly not the only one.
Naturally, there are also some bad apples, but they can be avoided if you
carefully read the posted comments and look closely at the pictures of the
shells offered.

The biggest and most irritating problems I encountered while buying from
Chinese dealers or simply receiving shells from Chinese collectors had
nothing to do with the quality of an auction site or the reliability of a
particular source. Instead, those problems were caused by courier services,
particularly EMS which apparently is big in China. They offer fairly low
rates to the Chinese sender, but what they don't tell them is the fact that
for that fee they do not necessarily deliver the parcel to the doorstep of
the addressee. Instead, they usually hold the parcel at the airport of entry
of the destination country and turn it over to a subcontractor for custom's
clearance and final delivery. That subcontractor, in Germany an outfit named
GDSK, charges the unsuspecting addressee a whopping additional fee of Euro
25.59 -- a flat fee, no matter what size the parcel is -- for the "service"
of finishing the delivery job that EMS in effect had already been paid for
by the Chinese sender. If you refuse to pay, they simply ship the parcel
back to the sender in China. In my opinion, that is modern highway robbery!
Adding insult to injury, this process of cutting in a middle man extends the
delivery time by 7-10 days, which is ridiculous for a courier service
priding itself on speed.
The only way to safeguard against this problem is to insist that the Chinese
sender does not use EMS, but the regular Chinese mail service which is very
reliable and in the end even faster than the courier service.

Cheers,

Michael

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