UPS’s explanations for shipping jewelry seems too complicated to warrant the risk
We’ve done a lot of searching and simply can’t find a clean answer on how to ship your jewelry via UPS and make sure it’s insured up to the correct amount. That is…unless you’re a business. If you are shipping jewelry as a business, it looks like you can use UPS Parcel Pro.
However, as a retail customer, UPS does not make it easy to determine how they handle jewelry, especially domestically. If you look at their terms and conditions page, on page 32, it seems like unless a specific declared value is set ahead of transport, the maximum liability they take on is $100. On page 31, however, they make mention of Maximum Declared Value of $50,000, and an Enhanced Maximum Declared value of $70,000. It does not, however, go into detail on how you attain this, or pay for this.
However, the big rub comes on page 31, where it explicitly calls out jewelry. On this page it says they have a maximum liability of $1,000 on jewelry, and this excludes costume jewelry. Some destinations outside of the U.S. appear to have a max liability of up to $2,500 though for some reason. They link to that information on an Excel spreadsheet here. Forewarning that document may be one of the least intuitive documents to understand, however, and it all appears to be international shipping info only.
To play it safe, we’d steer clear of shipping jewelry with UPS
With other shipping options out there…and those options having much more straightforward explanations, we personally would not ship with UPS. For example, check out our blog article on shipping jewelry via USPS. They have information directly on their site, and they even include scenario examples. The fact that all the information doesn’t exist easily on their site site proper (it’s all in pdfs, and Excel documents), and when you can find it, it’s contradictory and confusing. It just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort to figure it out, when there are other options out there.