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> People did the same thing on eBay by making the items almost free but the shipping expensive, until they fixed the eBay interface There’s a longer story to t
by Scoundreller 3y ago
> People did the same thing on eBay by making the items almost free but the shipping expensive, until they fixed the eBay interface
There’s a longer story to this: eBay used to exempt shipping fees from its commissions.
So sellers would be screwing eBay and, being an efficient market, as it often is on eBay, the savings would be passed onto the buyer.
I’d sell games for 1 cent with $10 shipping (cost to me: ~$2) and put the shipping cost in the title for clarity. If you didn’t like it, fine, pay more to buy from someone else.
Now they charge it on the whole purchase, which sucks when they take a ~15% commission on sales taxes and shipping and sellers can’t easily tack on a premium to these. So they get lower net proceeds when selling to someone that has high sales taxes or shipping fees.
This really discourages sellers from shipping internationally where those costs are higher.
Now that eBay charges percentage fees for “promoting” your item and getting visibility, bulk sellers will often post the exact same item, unpromoted, for less if you can be bothered to go through their “other items for sale”.
Have seen some wild examples where a seller sold one item at very different prices. They must have had items with 50% promotion fees, 25%, 5% and 0% (evidently passed onto the customer through different pricing) to capture the whole market.
- _puk 3y agoAs a user I always avoided those low cost, high postage listings as it just seemed a good way for a seller to avoid refunding the full amount. Refund would always be minus postage costs, so you'd get 1 cent back for your $10.01 purchase when returning (i.e. no point)
- Scoundreller 3y agoI think it’s up to seller’s policy if it’s a buyer’s remorse return situation. I find it hard to believe eBay wouldn’t make the buyer whole in a damaged/not as described case. Been a while since it came up for me (always sold stuff as “final sale” and if I avoid buying fragile stuff). Once had a hard time repaying a buyer that returned an item where I didn’t describe it correctly (screw you apple for having nearly identical LCDs but with slightly different camera cable lengths)
- EasyMark 3y agoThanks for the history. I was wondering why I was seeing less crazy rates on shipping. I had no idea it wasn't on the whole purchase price as that seemed obvious to me. I figured it was sellers hoping people wouldn't notice the s&h until the got to checkout
- Scoundreller 3y ago> I figured it was sellers hoping people wouldn't notice the s&h until the got to checkout There was a lot of that too. I’m sure it’s sometimes emotional: sellers wouldn’t want to “subsidize” shipping, so they’d fix the shipping fee to what the max could be for anywhere in the country. What grinds me as an international buyer is when sellers offer “free” shipping domestically, but don’t subsidize int’l shipping by the same dollar amount. Though there can be other time costs for int’l shipping. It depends.