Our International Shipping page is quite clear:
"You are responsible for assuring that any product you order can be lawfully imported to your destination country. When ordering from Coinabul.com, the recipient(purchaser) is the legal importer of record and must comply with all laws and regulations of your destination country."
No matter what the origin country, precious metals are unable to be imported into his nation(see
http://countries.bridgat.com/Czech_Republic_Import_Restrictions.html http://www.fedex.com/us/international/irc/profiles/irc_cz_profile.html http://pe.usps.com/text/imm/ce_019.htm). Since I saw this issue pop up after having no order volume to the Czech Republic until a couple of weeks ago, the Czech Republic has been disabled entirely in our system. We remove any countries that are glaringly obvious, but with 244 countries and countless territories in service, as well as language barriers for many of them which makes research very difficult, it's nearly impossible to verify on our end which countries across the globe have a specific ban on the import of precious metals, hence the special International Orders page linked to from the footer on every page within our site.
Bitcoin is heavily volatile- when a customer places an order, we replace his metal within our reserves, ship the order and convert the BTC to fiat as quickly as possible in order to preserve the spot indices as closely as we can between order placement and completion. Once an order comes in, the conversion process engages, and the customer owns their chosen metal from that point forward.
We deal with millions of dollars worth of bitcoins- sitting on that kind of risk profile is averse to the entire concept of the business via preserving wealth via stable precious metals. If someone bought $1,000 of gold when BTC is at $50, then it suddenly falls to $2/coin as it has in the past, and assume that gold stays stable as it tends to they'd be getting a refund of $1000 in either straight fiat on MtGox(our prefered for the transitory capability) or coins at the updated rate- not $40 worth of BTC. The same goes inversely.
If in the prior scenario gold skyrockets to 10x the value, the customer would get $10,000 as the refund instead of $1,000. Once the transaction is engaged in by the customer, the turbines spin up on our side to fill it as humanly fast as possible, and the customer owns metal as opposed to Bitcoins, as do we since we've already started replacing the metal that we've allocated to fill the customer's order. If the customer needs a refund, we'll refund the equivalent value of their metal provided we're legally allowed to.
Our TOS states this quite succintly:
"If an order cannot be filled by Coinabul we will either: provide a substitute product of your choice of equivalent value, or provide a refund, minus any market loss incurred and at our discretion."
We'll happily refund the going market value of the customer's metal + shipping costs whenever we are not specifically legally banned from doing so, and that hasn't happened yet.
This is exactly what we did here: he bought 10 ounces of silver which were valued at $28.3 at the time of his order, and spent around $20 for shipping. We refunded him $303 replacing the entirety of his silver's value as well as shipping.
