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Maybe not the same thing you’re seeing, but hiding the margin in shipping fees is a common and time-honored technique on e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay.
by keeda 1mo ago
Maybe not the same thing you’re seeing, but hiding the margin in shipping fees is a common and time-honored technique on e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay. Find any regular product, sort by price lowest-to-highest, and witness the number of very cheap items that look like an amazing deal… until you see the shipping charges. At which point it is as or often more expensive than the higher priced items + shipping.
It must be working on some unsuspecting shoppers because those listings are all over the place. There seems to be no policy against them either, and of course those items are never eligible for Prime shipping. To its credit, at least Amazon these days shows you the shipping costs on the product page itself, as opposed to finding out at checkout.
- crazygringo 1mo agoOn eBay for certain scammy sellers, but not as a general rule. And on Amazon, certainly not for items sold by Amazon or part of Prime. Again, only scammy third-party sellers.
- keeda 1mo agoI guess by definition if they’re doing such things they’re scammy… and aren’t 3rd party sellers the biggest contingent of sellers on Amazon? I mean, I found such listings for almost all of the things I recently shopped for, including water bottles, cooking appliances, sports shorts, coffee cups, camping chairs, usb drives, video cables, beach sandals, winter wear, multivitamin supplements… Not quite a scientific study, but I always sort by cheapest just to check and see this pattern every time. The distinction you make is technically correct, but a does not lessen the scale at which it is happening.
- crazygringo 1mo agoI buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, and 99.9% of it has free shipping. I've had to pay a shipping fee maybe 3 times over the past decade, if I'm guessing? Even if there are tons of scammy expensive-shipping listings, if people are almost never buying them and they almost never get surfaced in search results, it doesn't matter. But I've also never even tried sorting by cheapest, because default sorting by relevance has always worked for me.