Freight Forward - How can you tell?

[oldwestcoins]

I continue to read about so many eBay scams from freight forward addresses. I know little about them.  How can you tell? Thanks for your time.

[therogue-trader]

Check the buyer's declared address, check where the buyer's ebay account is registered.  Also, often a freight-forwarding location will be some suite/apartment number in a city and/or have a weird-looking string of letters/numbers (presumably a reference number for their own system) or some such.

[coolections]

Reading these boards would make inexperienced Ebay people think everything is bad and the world is going to end. In reality complaints here are less than 1% of all transactions. People only come here when they have problems. A far as freight forwarders go, you don't really need to know. All you have to do is make sure the payment says OK to ship to the address provided here in the U.S.

[jonathankirkland]

Well as with many things, Google can be your best friend OP.

If you suspect an address could be a freight forwarder just Google it and it will become very obvious whether it is or not.

Additionally, you can (or I should say used to be able to) setup a 'block' so that anyone using a foreign Paypal (or I guess rather foreign 'currency') cannot buy your listing.

If one is so inclined they can do quite a bit to safe guard themselves from scammers but nothing is 100%. And forgive me if my info is out of date, a lot of those settings had to do with Paypal and not sure if they all translate to Managed Payments as well though I hope they do...

[gjs_16]

Don't even think about it, if a buyer paid it is the seller's duty to ship.

Eaby catches you cancelling orders and they will restrict your selling privileges...

[chapeau-noir]

You can back check the address to verify, and if it really does seem bogus, it's legit to cancel the order with problem with address, but I've never run into that once and I've shipped to freight forwarders for years.  I even have two forwarders that I ship to on a regular basis.  

Don't let the occasional possible 'scam' put you off - reading the forums can give one a jaundiced view because, as said above, it's generally the people who are having problems who come here for some help, and about half the threads I read on the subject aren't even problems with freight forwarders, but people worried about problems with freight forwarders.