What should be the terms between buyer and seller

Thank you all for your helpful responses. It gives me a good overview of the lay of the land.
Joe

Viridian, when's the last time you made a phone call for a dime? Man you must be old. Actually I remember pay phones in Louisianna costing a nickle. Now I use my cell phone with free long distance.
Best advice is talk to the guy.

My speakers came Bax and they still managed to mess em up, 2 310lbs speakers and one guy on the truck....go figure!

I had speakers damaged via FedEx and they(FedEx) would not deal with me at all. They said they had to deal with the shipper, since he was the one who paid. They shipped the speakers back to him and he got the refund for the damage, not me. Luckily he was a good guy and everything worked out. But I could have ended up with nothing and he could have ended up with two checks, mine & FedEx's and the speakers.

Bottom line, make sure you're comfortable with they guy you're dealing with, just in case there's a problem.

for me, when it's a high dollar transaction i always try to talk to the person on the phone at least once. Its a lot easier to get a feeling for a person when you can hear their voice. Postal money orders are the hot ticket because, as was said above, getting a fed fraud rap is enough to make a lot of folks think...the postal guys are fairly agressive in persuing that kind of thing.

I got a pair of dunlavy athenas shiped from NC to Ne by covering shipping and a deposit with a PMO and then paying the rest with a PMO COD when the boxes came off the truck. If the boxes are trashed you can put a hold on the rest of the transaction right there. I went to a freight co to get my speakers shipped and it cost less than $300 as i remember. Much cheaper and to be honest i trust those guys more than the UPS guys. the trucking company just looked at the trucks in the are and found one with a partial load to fill and away they went. coordination between the seller and the trucker got a bit tricky but it worked.

That crap about fed ex/ups settling with the shipper is a chief rant of mine. I've had claims on about 30% of the stuff i've recieved and it is a huge hassel. THe seller has his money and sometimes they are in no hurry to settle things, especially considering the cooperative nature of the package services.