I think this has been another interesting and valuable thread. From what I have read here I think there are three ways to deal with the issue of insurance and security of your shipments.

First off there needs to be consideration for the value of the chip(s) and the amount of profit that is realized in the auction(s). I am sure some auctions finish with a very slim margin of profit and situations like that might warrant requiring "ACTUAL POSTAGE OR SHIPPING" expenses. If the item is going to sell for say $50 insurance should be automatic, in my opinioin, and, say, you paid $45 for it than you obviously can't include the shipping, insurance and other costs. That wouldn't be fair to you. This would be a case, I think, where requiring actuall shipping charges and insurance would be warranted.

On the other hand, if you are selling a very valuable item or one that has a fair or high margin of profit say a chip that cost you $10 that generates bids for $75 or something, than you might consider selling the item for the bid and paying all the expenses for shipping, postage, insurance, delivery confirmation etc. yourself. In this example you can obviously afford to protect yourself. In fact, it can be better, for valuable items, to ship via FedX or UPS and pay the extra cost. This is probably the catagory that most conventional merchants fall into. They buy their items at wholesale and mark up the prices to what you will buy. The profit they are going to make has all the costs and losses factored into them. They then charge a standard shipping charge and that is it. All risks and losses are then absorbed into the calculated profits.

Then, of course, you have the issue of low price items where you can probably just charge a small shipping or postage charge and risk the insurance etc. Say a $5 new LE release that sells at auction for $7.50 or $8. By the time you take out commission to eBay and the listing fees, If you added postage, insurance packaging, delivery confirmation etc. you would be falling below the face value of the chip. Therefore it doesn't make much sense to utilize these services and the occasional instances where you might get burned are cheeper to risk.