eBay and Local Pickups

If you sell products on eBay for your home-based business do you allow for local pickups? eBay does offer that as a shipping option and I'm sure it works very well for businesses who have a physical location away from home. But it doesn't work very well for home-based businesses. The more we sell on eBay, the more this request seems to come up. I always avoid allowing these pickups and this is the reason I give to the customer: Hello and thanks for asking - We're a home-based business and due to zoning ordinances and insurance issues, we are not set up to allow for local pickups. There is nothing false about this statement; it's 100% true. Unless you have set your home-based business up to allow for onsite customers / clientele, you will be taking a risk allowing people to come to your home to pick items up. A better reason (which I don't say to the customer) is that I simply don't want to invite strangers into our home. And with relatively few exceptions, eBay customers are complete strangers to us. One option is using your Private Mailbox operators. In this post, I talked about using a Private Mailbox for your business address. Sometimes the operators of these businesses will let you bring packages in for your customers to pick up as long as it is an occasional request. What about you? Do you allow customers or clients to visit your home?