During the recent Christmas period, one of my print shipments was damaged during the UPS shipment. There have always been some horror stories of we photographers dealing with reimbursement of claims from the various shipping companies so I thought it would be of some worth to share my current experience here with others. Having to absorb the full cost of a damaged shipment without insurance reimbursement is certainly painful considering the meager profits most of us reap from our work.
A customer for a fine art print on the East Coast received a UPS ground shipped package within the usual time frame and immediately noted the damage to the container as received. I go to some length on my website alerting my customers what they ought to do when receiving a package showing physical damage. Additionally I have a custom label on my packages that advises customers to not accept damaged packages when the UPS delivery person come by so they can initiate a return to shipper process immediately. In this case the recipient business was not in position to immediately turn the package around because of their daily volume of packages received. Per my website instructions upon inspection, they did promptly contact me via email and attached a digital camera image of that damage. The next day the damaged package was returned to UPS for shipment back to the actual shipper Staples that is responsible for initiating the claims process including collection of information.
Upon return of the damaged package, I began working through Staples which is one of several national companies that have official UPS outlets within their retail stores. Thus a claim number was created for the UPS tracking number. Staples has a national claims office that works directly with UPS over shipping damage claims so that I didn't need to personally communicate with UPS. A week later, I have received status that UPS approved the modest insurance reimbursement and I will be receiving a check within a couple weeks. All individuals I communicated with on this matter have been quite helpful and professional thus I can happily applaud their handling of this small case.
This was the first time damage has occurred during any shipment of prints to my customers. Something I'd hoped never to have to deal with but knew would likely eventually occur. In this case I use 36 inch long 4 inch diameter, 1.25 pound, white Uline shipping tubes to ship rolled Fuji Crystal Archive prints.
http://www.uline.com/ProductDetail.a...-2361&ref=3654
The shipping tube is more robust with heavy 0.08 inch thick spiral paper than usual tube containers. And I choose the larger diameter tubes so that my prints won't need to be rolled quite so tightly. Regardless these containers can be crushed inwardly if other heavy containers are atop them. Such occasionally occurs at UPS receiving warehouses when their automated ship movement conveyors become over clogged. For my fine art print business model, I have chose not to ship matted or framed prints but rather rolled prints in shipping tubes. Thus allow the customer to seek out the many framing businesses that in any case are likely to do a much better job than most of we photographers. Of course shipping framed prints, and especially those with glass, require considerably more effort with packaging, and are inherently more likely to suffer damage. Something I had done in previous days a decade and more ago. Additionally the raw cost of even a 32x40 inch print is considerable less than a matted or framed print such that in my case the cost is under the $100 basic default insurance offered by UPS for all their shipments. Thus no need to purchase an additional insurance fee. Finally I'll note that there is an advantage when dealing with damage claims through one of the UPS authorized shippers as Staple or The UPS Store versus delivering a package via the many UPS non authorized outlets.
...David
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Originally Posted by Michael Gordon
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