Is shipping insurance from vendors worth the extra cost...

Vendors typically offer shipping insurance as an add-on at checkout for an additional fee, and I've thought about whether it's worth paying more times than I'd like. My current position is that it's almost never worth it for the reasons I'll explain.

The most common promise behind vendor shipping insurance is a free reship or refund if your package is seized by customs or doesn't arrive. This sounds valuable because seizures happen and losing an order is annoying. The issue is that most reputable vendors already offer the same guarantee without the insurance add-on. If you're ordering from a vendor with a documented reshipment policy for customs losses, you've already got the protection you'd be paying for.

The vendors where the insurance add-on might actually mean something extra are vendors whose standard policy is less clearly defined — where you're not sure whether a customs loss would be replaced without the insurance. But if a vendor's baseline policy is that vague, I'd treat that as a reason to scrutinize the vendor generally rather than a reason to buy their insurance.

There's also a practical limit on what shipping insurance can cover. The insurance typically covers the cost of the order, not consequential losses from not having the item. If you needed the card for a specific event and it got seized, a reship that arrives three weeks later doesn't fully compensate for the timing loss. The insurance only addresses the financial replacement, and that's what a good reshipment policy covers anyway.

Where I've seen the insurance argument made most convincingly is for very large orders where the production cost is high enough that a reship would represent a significant service cost to the vendor. In that context, contributing to the reship economics through an insurance fee is more defensible. For a standard single-card order from a vendor with a solid reshipment policy, I consistently decline the add-on.