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Originally Posted by blankall
I've sold a lot of cards on Ebay too, although my volume, at it's height was more like $15-20k.
Most of the things you say are correct. Although Ebay has new shipping programs that are pretty economical to the USA. They have a flat shipping light package option, that comes with tracking. The price used to be about $8 CAD but has gone up to $14 CAD.
As you sell cheaper cards, that $14 CAD makes less sense. A cutoff of about $40 is probably the right amount for that shipping option. For cards less than $40 I ship lettermail with a postage stamp. That bears its own risks though. About 1/30 sales will result in "lost package", which is just usually someone making a false claim. You have to treat that as a sunk cost and make sure you aren't using the lettermail option for expensive cards.
You can also choose to be somewhat selective on your buyers. For example, put in the description that you won't sell to anyone with less than 100 ratings and hasn't had an account for more than 3 years. That will weed out a lot of the scammers.
Looking back at some of my sales now.....Damn prices were good. I sold a Tkachuk BGS 9.5 YG for $400 after the first cup. Sold the same card this year, after the recent cup win for $127....
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Back when I did ebay, we used DYKpost for US packages. They're a local remailer. With them, you have a US post office box in Montana and you buy US tracked postage online using that return address. You take your package to DYKpost and then once a day DYKpost drives all the packages from their Calgary customers across the border and mails them from some small town in Montana. It worked pretty well, and it brought the price for tracked shipping to the US down to about $5-$6 included the DYKpost fee. It might be more now, but other than the having to drive to the DYKpost warehouse to drop off packages multiple times a week, it was convenient and cheaper than the other options.
Edit: I used Shippo to buy the US postage. I think there might have been some other company I also used at one point, but I think Shippo had a good website that was easy and fast to use.