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Having said that, we have practiced safe measures for quite a while now.Prior to shipping, we took pictures of the box and the item(s) unboxed and boxed.This will go a long way to prove negligence on their part.Without pictures then it's impossible to prove anything to the judge.
Both FedEx & UPS are counting on people not wanting to waste their time to go to court and so they keep practicing their claim denial. In our case, not only did we file the claimed value amount but also the amount of time we spent on dealing with them at a certain $$ per hour.Once they denied our claim, we sent them a letter to state as such.Think about it, once they received the complaint form from the court, they will forward it to their legal department and I am sure it's better for them to settle out of court than pay their lawyer and take a chance at the mercy of the judge.Having said that, we have practiced safe measures for quite a while now.Prior to shipping, we took pictures of the box and the item(s) unboxed and boxed.This will go a long way to prove negligence on their part.Without pictures then it's impossible to prove anything to the judge.
My workplace ships a lot of expensive artwork with FedEx. However, we only use them when time pressures are so urgent a gallery can't wait for an art shipper service or when we're shipping flat, unframed prints. Everything gets shipped encased in custom built plywood containers or crates, we never use cardboard boxes to ship anything, ever. Even then, FedEx manages to mangle and multilate shipments occasionally. It's not the falling off the conveyor belts in the warehouse that does our stuff in, it's the FedEx gorillas that have the keys to the forklifts that do the damage! There's no packaging on earth that withstand the assault of a runaway forklift blade We once had to re-fabricate and replace a $50,000 sculpture that took a direct forklift blade hit to the center of a crate in FEdEx's NYC airport terminal facility. (Replacement fabrication was done on our dime, FedEx won't insure Fine Art shipments for more than $500.00)
I wanted to update this thread because I just received my refund from the insurance company. My amp was insured for $1500 and that is exactly what I was refunded today. The moral(s) of this story is/are DOUBLE BOX all equipment that you plan to ship, and do insure it especially if it is a high value item. I still do not know the name of the insurance company as everything was handled through Audiogon's rep. I was told it would take approximately 30 days and that was pretty close to the actual time. I was given the option of taking the refund via Paypal instead of snail mail, so I opted for Paypal. (It's already in my account.)Closure....
Words of advice re FedEx.We recently shipped a box through them and it arrived undamaged on the outside but the item was shattered beyond repair.We honestly didn't know how it could happen since we took extra measures to ensure they were packaged extremely well.Anyway, we asked the customer to take pictures as well as filing a claim with FedEx.The first automatic response from FedEx was we didn't pack it good enough and the claim was denied.The customer then asked FedEx how can you denied a claim without seeing the pictures of the damaged item.FedEx then admitted they were rushed to conclusion and asked for pictures.The customer never heard back from them so I had to call FedEx myself and pointed out to them, from the pictures, that there is a visible dent right in the middle of the box which was not there when we handed the box over to FedEx.To make a long story short, all we got was Claim Denied.We resolved to take them to Small Claim Court and they settled out of court prior to court date.By the way, FedEx never sent anybody to inspect the item.
