A good courier service would track the amount of insurance claims as a KPI... I live in hope!
Neil - how many people actually take out the insurance when booking through such as parcel2go (other similar services are available). Having used their services for over more than 10yrs now their current insurance rates are sky high and can only reflect the losses incurred. It is often cheaper to ship by Royal Mail/ ParcelForce with inclusive insurance.
It also takes a great many weeks to get the insurance paid out and you need to chase them up.
Those bits I sell on eBay now are open to oversea's buyers but the goods will go through the GSP. I had a potential buyer complain to me about why it cost so much for some PCB's to be shipped to them. I openly admitted I could send the PCB's to them more cheaply and directly but my experiences with overseas sales has been highly variable in the past and I would rather 'lose' sales then take on more grief.
Such as Royal Mail base their lost mail figures solely on claims made which ignores the fact that many people simply won't bother.
Many years ago we made a claim for an item that 'got lost' in the UK. We duly filled out the Royal Mail form and, credit to the customer, so did they. RM wanted to know what the true cost of the item was so it was a built up electronic item this boiled down to the cost of the components, labour and postage appeared to be excluded from the compensation figure as far as we would see.
From that point forward we just allowed for 5% of annual sales going missing and added that to the cost of all items sold. This still didn't stop items 'reportedly' going missing and we then went to 2nd Class Signed For for everything we sold which kind of cured the problem within the UK but not overseas.
The likes of Digi-Key/ Mouser/ RS/ Farnell etc. don't use Hermes - so why would anybody else? I've never had a problem with UPS in over 20yrs.................... nor Royal Mail/ Parcelforce that I can recall. It's a complete pain in the bottom that the only courier service (and I use the term loosely here) available to our home address via p2g is Herpes.
Regards
Richard