I have sold a large bulky musical instrument (a marimba) on Ebay to a fellow in Germany. I probably wouldn’t have agreed to sell it to him if he had asked first, but he did the Buy It Now and paid for it during the night, so I’m going to make a go of it. Anyone have any idea how to affordably ship something large and heavy overseas? It will be packed in (probably) six boxes of various largeish sizes, with the heaviest being about 30 pounds. UPS is not the way; I priced out one box there and their cheapest service was like $500, unless I was doing something horribly wrong on their website.
I think you need to contact a freight company. You can send it via air or sea, and they will add it to one of their regular transatlantic shipments. They usually charge by weight not volume IIRC. That’s how I shipped all my worldly possessions from the UK to California when I moved out here.
For what it’s worth, a couple of months ago I used a company called Shannon Express to surface ship some 10 boxes of books to China. They were really cheap ($700 vs the $2000+ the post office wanted) and very easy to work with. They also ship to Europe.
The fact that USPS no longer does surface shipping outside the US boggles the mind.
They’re not shipping one box at a time, though, but more likely whole containers. That cuts costs a bit.
But yeah, an individual package can be prohibitively expensive sometimes. Perhaps Daniel should discuss this with
the buyer, just to ensure he is prepared to actually pay the shipping.