7 ms·

Wait til this guy learns about free shipping.

jerf 3y ago
Obviously, there is no such thing as free shipping. Yes, I also just consider that part of the price. Coincidentally in the past couple of days I've been doing a lot of shopping in a space where the good is nominally ~$10 but shipping is ~$20. I've heard that there's a lot of distortions like that brought on by various storefront systems not allowing you to set per-item shipping prices sufficiently granularly, and the store owners will compensate by setting their target shipping price in whatever manner they can and then making the target item price whatever it needs to be to work out. For the particular things I'm shopping for (semi-obscure CDs), $30 is a reasonable price with shipping, so I bought without complaining, because the "shipping price" isn't really relevant to me, only the final price I pay. For a while you could kind of run some scams where you the store aggregation sites would show you as the cheapest because your price was $1 and the sort order would ignore your $25 shipping fee, sorting you in front of the shop selling for $5 and $5 shipping, but all the aggregators I've seen lately have switched to sorting by price + shipping so that doesn't work anymore.
- rprospero 3y ago
  I also remember another variant on the shipping practice back when there used to be other auction sites competing with eBay. It was standard practice for the site to take a percentage of the sale price, but some sites didn't include the shipping price in that calculation. Thus, the seller made more money off selling a Playstation for $1 with $190 in shipping than they would off selling it for $200 with free shipping. I even remember someone setting up a shipping company that would generate the invoices to "prove" that these were the actual shipping prices. They'd then subcontract the actual shipping out to the USPS and pay an $195 "affiliate loyalty comission" back to the original seller.
_ea1k 3y ago
I kind of hate free shipping, tbh. It heavily favors sellers with massive distribution systems. Without it, a nearby distributor might look like a more compelling option than the giant monolithic (and near monopolistic) online retailer.

jerf 3y ago

Obviously, there is no such thing as free shipping. Yes, I also just consider that part of the price. Coincidentally in the past couple of days I've been doing a lot of shopping in a space where the good is nominally ~$10 but shipping is ~$20. I've heard that there's a lot of distortions like that brought on by various storefront systems not allowing you to set per-item shipping prices sufficiently granularly, and the store owners will compensate by setting their target shipping price in whatever manner they can and then making the target item price whatever it needs to be to work out. For the particular things I'm shopping for (semi-obscure CDs), $30 is a reasonable price with shipping, so I bought without complaining, because the "shipping price" isn't really relevant to me, only the final price I pay. For a while you could kind of run some scams where you the store aggregation sites would show you as the cheapest because your price was $1 and the sort order would ignore your $25 shipping fee, sorting you in front of the shop selling for $5 and $5 shipping, but all the aggregators I've seen lately have switched to sorting by price + shipping so that doesn't work anymore.

rprospero 3y ago
I also remember another variant on the shipping practice back when there used to be other auction sites competing with eBay. It was standard practice for the site to take a percentage of the sale price, but some sites didn't include the shipping price in that calculation. Thus, the seller made more money off selling a Playstation for $1 with $190 in shipping than they would off selling it for $200 with free shipping. I even remember someone setting up a shipping company that would generate the invoices to "prove" that these were the actual shipping prices. They'd then subcontract the actual shipping out to the USPS and pay an $195 "affiliate loyalty comission" back to the original seller.

_ea1k 3y ago

I kind of hate free shipping, tbh. It heavily favors sellers with massive distribution systems. Without it, a nearby distributor might look like a more compelling option than the giant monolithic (and near monopolistic) online retailer.