I'm always impressed with how some people treat what they sell as worthless junk, yet they sell it for the price of the opposite. These two need to match!

I've been relatively lucky. Had a Creatures 2 cd snapped in half during shipping, that just got refunded. And a motherboard I ordered just... never appeared. Near as myself and the guy who dropped it off at USPS can tell, it's probably sitting in a corner somewhere, forgotten and ignored. The tracking was stuck at "label created", and it was never acknowledged that he dropped it off. Got a full refund on that too.

I've had a few motherboards shipped to me in questionable packaging. Stuff like no anti-static bag, wrapped in a few layers of bubble wrap, taped, then stuffed in a padded envelope between two thin sheets of cardboard. But they were project boards listed as for parts or repair that I wanted to practice on. So I guess that's understandable.

But I specifically avoid ordering cases, CRT monitors, or anything else where the shipping is expensive and scary. Seen too many horror stories for those.

I experienced all of these just in the past week:

No ESD protection. I can't believe how many items I buy and no ESD wrapper is protecting the hardware.
Item shipped with weak box walls. Of course, it's going to be smashed.
Box far bigger than the contents bouncing around inside (which Amazon and Wal-Mart are notorious for this...)
Box dropped in the ocean from helicopter from Europe to float its way to the United States (at least it looked like it)

It's been a few months since this happened:

Sellers shipping the ORIGINAL BOX wrapped in plastic or brown wrap. The original box is NOT the shipping container.
No protection at all except the padded envelope.

My anecdotal experience is that I really mostly can't complain. All people I've dealt with (Amibay and ebay almost exclusively) have put from good to amazing packaging care.

Reading some horror stories, looks like I may have been lucky to have none to share.

@meatball ouch, that is painful to see 🙁

I've been mostly lucky , I bought a floppy slide out drawer once that had a bit of plastic cracked off that I pretty easily glued back on ,

The weirder case was me ordering a DB25 cable on amazon which somehow according to the customer service people at aramex was completely destroyed by being crushed during transit , not sure how you manage that.

I have only this "funny" story with a happy end. I collect games from Origin and as every collector I have also stuff as doubles. In this case a Savage empire for the Famicom that I sent to a friend in Colombia. Apparently at some point during its travel, the box got soaked and then sat in the sun and everything inside went moldy.
BUT the game survived unharmed because I packed it really good in plastic and bubblewrap...

Or I sent a self made game box (not a reproduction but a re-imagination of the Ultima VII box) to someone in Israel. Right when there were attacks.

Two thin paper envelopes and piece of a bubble wrap, that's how things are being sent from Japan to the opposite part of the globe when you don't pay an additional fee for protective packaging.

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2022-09-08, 17:24:

Two thin paper envelopes and piece of a bubble wrap, that's how things are being sent from Japan to the opposite part of the globe when you don't pay an additional fee for protective packaging.

I once absolutely did pay enough shipping fees to cover protective packaging and I got the item wrapped inside a plastic bag rolled to a ball with tape, no box whatsoever. So much for the shipping fee, I'm sure the seller found some better use for that money.

Sombrero wrote on 2022-09-08, 17:36:

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2022-09-08, 17:24:

Two thin paper envelopes and piece of a bubble wrap, that's how things are being sent from Japan to the opposite part of the globe when you don't pay an additional fee for protective packaging.

I once absolutely did pay enough shipping fees to cover protective packaging and I got the item wrapped inside a plastic bag rolled to a ball with tape, no box whatsoever. So much for the shipping fee, I'm sure the seller found some better use for that money.

Since then I pay for a protective packaging every time I ship something from Japan and they package it in such a way that you can play football with contents and nothing will happen to it.

Sombrero wrote on 2022-09-08, 17:36:

I once absolutely did pay enough shipping fees to cover protective packaging and I got the item wrapped inside a plastic bag rolled to a ball with tape, no box whatsoever. So much for the shipping fee, I'm sure the seller found some better use for that money.

OMG, same. I ordered a cheap (modern) Optiplex SFF off of ebay last year, and it arrived in nothing but bubble wrap. No box at all, and the plastics were totally damaged. It had been snowing too, so the poor thing was just drenched. After drying it off, it fired up and worked just fine.

Fortunately, I got most of my money back. The damaged case doesn't really bother me anymore, since it's hidden away in a console.

I bought an amiga card from someone in Italy (I'm in the UK). Postal service sent it to the USA by mistake, but it came back eventually. Roundabout trip!

A card from Russia I bought got delivered and signed for in the wrong town once it got to this country. After six weeks - I'd given up hope - it was redelivered to me.

In both cases the parcels were correctly labelled etc. And for what it's worth the items turned out fine.

He he, one parcel from the UK was supposed to go to Austria but it went on a detour to Australia 🤷‍♂️🤣

ratfink wrote on 2022-09-09, 09:38:

I bought an amiga card from someone in Italy (I'm in the UK). Postal service sent it to the USA by mistake, but it came back eventually. Roundabout trip!

I bought something in US and it was sent to other buyer who lives in Denmark instead (some few thousand miles from me). In the end it was sent to me from Denmark free of charge and arrived without any problems. Little trip my new acquisition had on its way to me, no big deal. 🙂