One-page answer sheet for the twelve questions we get most

What is a spreadsheet in this context? A list of marketplace listings, maintained by hand, whose entries are addresses to be pasted into an agent rather than products to be bought from the list. Are these lists safe to use? The list itself carries no risk, because it is only text; the questions that matter belong to the marketplace listing and to the payment terms of the agent you use. How current is a list? Exactly as current as its newest review date, and a list with no date is undated rather than fresh.

Why do the links in a list stop working? Because listings get renewed, restructured or removed, and because short-form addresses expire or get repointed at something other than the listing they once described. What is an item identifier for? It is the portable key: it survives a re-listing and a change of agent, unlike the title, which is a label. What does the trailing number in a list name mean? A rebuild count, not a quality score and not a ranking.

Do I still need the list once I have the identifier? Not for the purchase, since the identifier is enough to reach the listing; yes as a discovery tool, because lists are how you find things you did not know to search for. How long does shipping take? Use the community-reported range for your line type and destination and plan on the upper bound; the ranges are windows observed across many parcels rather than service promises. How is the shipping cost worked out? From chargeable weight, which is the greater of actual and volumetric, charged on the service band, plus fixed per-parcel lines.

Who pays the duty? The importer does, which is you; an agent or carrier may advance it and collect it later, and the structure varies by destination rather than by parcel. Can I combine items from different sellers into one parcel? Yes, that is consolidation, and the thing to remember is that each seller adds its own domestic leg. What do I do with a dead entry? Re-key it from the identifier, and if the identifier is dead too, drop the row and date the change so the next reader knows when it was last good.

On what a list is and whether to trust it: a shared list is a pointer set, so its quality is a question about whether the pointers resolve, not about whether the maintainers are trustworthy people. Safety is a separate axis, and it belongs to the marketplace listing and the agent's payment terms, which is why a list can be entirely clean and still lead you to a bad purchase. Currency is the field that decides how much the list is worth to you, and the review date is the only reliable evidence of it. A list without dates asks you to take its freshness on faith. It is also worth saying what a list is not: it is not a warranty about any seller, it is not maintained by the marketplace, and nothing obliges its author to keep it current. Most disappointment reported about shared lists traces back to expecting a maintained directory from something closer to a personal notebook that happens to be public. That reframing is not cynicism; it tells you which fields to check yourself rather than which list to trust, and field-checking is a habit that transfers between lists.

On links and identifiers: addresses decay for structural reasons, which is why the failure rate rises with the age of the row rather than with the quality of the list. An item identifier is the part of a row that survives decay, because it names the listing in the marketplace's own terms rather than in a rendering of an address. The trailing number in a list name counts rebuilds, so it tells you how recently the pointer set was replaced and nothing about how good the entries are.

On whether you still need the list: once you hold an identifier, the list has done its job for that purchase, and the reason to keep using lists is discovery rather than reference. Transit is where expectations are most often wrong, and the correction is to read the published ranges as distributions and plan on the upper bound, adding slack for peak weeks. Cost is the other place expectations go wrong, and the correction is to compute chargeable weight before comparing services, because a box that bills on volume changes which service is cheapest. Chargeable weight is the pivot of every estimate on this site, and it comes from two figures that are both cheap to obtain: the packed weight and the outer dimensions. Take those two, run them through the divisor for each candidate service, and the shortlist usually narrows itself. Doing that before paying removes the single most common source of a bill that arrives higher than the estimate.

On duty, consolidation and dead rows: the importer is the party liable, so a delivered parcel with a charge attached is not a mistake by the carrier, it is the structure working as published. Consolidation is the main reason to use an agent at all, and its arithmetic is that each additional seller adds a domestic leg while sharing one international one. A dead entry is a maintenance event rather than a crisis: re-key it, or drop it and record the date, so that the list keeps converging on the truth instead of accumulating rows nobody has checked. The last of those is the step people skip, and it compounds, because a list that keeps dead entries slowly becomes a record of things that used to exist.

It is enough when the decision is small and reversible. Whether a listing is worth opening, whether a list is worth using at all, whether a row needs re-keying, whether to ask for a second photograph: these are decisions where a correct frame matters more than a precise number, and the twelve answers supply the frame.

It is not enough when a number decides the outcome. A bill cannot be estimated from this sheet, because it depends on chargeable weight, the service band and the fixed lines on your specific parcel. A duty question cannot be answered here either, because it turns on the published threshold at your destination and on how the consignment is declared. And a return decision needs the three outcomes costed against the item value rather than a rule of thumb, which is what the return tool is for.

Treat the sheet as a router rather than an answer key. Every question on it has a page or a tool behind it that holds the working, and where this sheet and a tool disagree, the tool wins, because the tool is keyed to your numbers and this sheet is keyed to the common case. That ordering is deliberate and it is also how the sheet stays short. It explains the style of the answers as well: the one-line versions are written to be useful without a tool, which means they describe the shape of the right answer rather than its value. A shape is enough to decide whether the detail deserves an evening, and that decision is what most readers actually need from a page like this.

The list of twelve is reviewed with the rest of the site each quarter. Questions that stop arriving get dropped, and new ones get added with the same one-line treatment, so the sheet stays a snapshot of what people actually ask rather than a permanent syllabus. If your question is not on it, that is a gap worth reporting, and the corrections address is the route that gets it fixed. A question qualifies for the sheet on two conditions: it has to recur, and it has to be answerable without a tool. Questions that are real but singular belong in the longer answer pages, where there is room to carry the exception, and questions that need numbers belong in the tools, where the numbers can be entered rather than assumed. Keeping those three destinations distinct is what stops this page from growing into something nobody reads to the end.