General > General Technical Chat
Why is some ebay shipping so high?
Halcyon:
Yes ebay automatically calculates fees based on pricing it gets directly from the postal services, however it relies on the details put in by the seller of the equipment.
There is also an additional field the seller can enter a fixed dollar amount which is added to the calculated price to cover things like packaging and handling costs.
jeremy:
Perhaps someone from the US can chime in, but it seems to me that everyone in the US is used to FedEx/UPS and near overnight delivery, and so those are the services they offer to their predominantly US customer based. Obviously “as fast as possible” shipping is going to be more expensive over an international route. Those shipping companies also don’t really seem to care (in my opinion) about the Australian market. But even that isn’t the whole story, because I often order things from China via UPS and FedEx and the price isn’t too bad (it’s more than I want to pay, but can’t argue with the speed). Only when it comes from the US.
Global shipping program is ok, but they don’t specifically notarise what is GST and what isn’t, so it’s not possible to claim it back for a business expense. It’s just “import duties and fees” as one lump sum if I remember correctly.
I’ve regularly order items with DHL from China and postage seems to be quite reasonable given that it can sometimes come in 2 days!
As for the obscene shipping charges, ebay charges sellers a fee for each listing. So to save money, if the seller runs out of stock and expects more to come (or just want to appear like they have lots of interesting items) they will boost the shipping price to some crazy amount so nobody will buy it.
TK:
No, test equipment is shipped mostly UPS/Fedex Ground in the US, way too expensive to ship express. You cannot compare shipping charges from China to the world as they are dirty cheap compared even to local US to US shipments using the same carriers.
jeremy:
--- Quote from: TK on February 19, 2020, 11:54:38 am ---You cannot compare shipping charges from China to the world as they are dirty cheap compared even to local US to US shipments using the same carriers.
--- End quote ---
Does anyone know why this is the case? I understand there are some issues with the postal service and international subsidies, but I assumed that couriers (DHL, UPS and FedEx) didn’t have anything to do with that?
Cerebus:
I'm currently sitting in London, England, waiting for UPS to arrive with a package that ~36 hours ago was in Thief River Falls in the frozen north of Minnesota (-17ºC yesterday, a balmy day by Minnesota standards). It's coming from Digikey who charge a flat £12 GBP shipping for orders less than £33 GBP and offer free shipping for orders over that value (this by the way is with all duty and tax prepaid so there's no hassle with customs at this end).
If Digikey (annual revenue $2.3bn) can manage to get rates from UPS that make that affordable for them then surely eBay (annual revenue $10.8bn) ought to be able to cobble together a shipping programme that offered competitive rates to US sellers for getting stuff hassle free to the rest of the world?
I suspect that a lot of US eBay sellers just think that the rest of the world is too much hassle and think that the US already provides them with a big enough market. However, you can definitely get higher prices for used test gear in the UK and Europe than you can in the US. With the US balance of payments currently sitting at around minus half a trillion dollars you'd think that US ebay sellers might realise that a getting a bit of exporting going would be a good idea, the patriotic thing to do. Ironically I'd bet that the US eBay sellers who think themselves most patriotic are probably the ones who put the most barriers in front of potential overseas customers. I base that guess on the fact that whenever I see something interesting looking there tends to be a high correlation between conspicuous US flag usage on a vendor's pages and prohibitively high export costs.
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