General > General Technical Chat
Why is some ebay shipping so high?
Helix70:
Is the shipping for some items automatically calculated by eBay for certain items? I can't work it out.
I have had power supplies (Agilent 6612C) shipped for US$46.82 from the US to Australia, and then you see other items that are similar size/weight asking $470US for a $220 US buy price.
Is eBay Global Shipping harder for the seller? It seems that the Global Shipping offered by eBay is much cheaper than all other otions.
PTR_1275:
It all comes down to the dimensions the seller puts in.
They might put in a weight of 50kg to deliberately make ebay out the price of postage up. For some reason a lot of American sellers refuse to deal with international sales and this is their way of making it “worth their while”
Ebay algorithms elevate you in the search results for all sorts of reasons. International postage is one of them as is having a express option.
SiliconWizard:
Yep... I've found US sellers to have increased international shipping fees to atrocious levels lately... it's pretty sad for us outside of the US, although I can understand.
Stray Electron:
--- Quote from: Helix70 on January 12, 2020, 09:22:57 am ---
Is eBay Global Shipping harder for the seller? It seems that the Global Shipping offered by eBay is much cheaper than all other otions.
--- End quote ---
That's not my understanding. I talked to Ebay when they first started the GSP and it seems that they want to seller to ship the item to them (some place in Kentucky IIRC) and they will bundle it with all of the other items that are going to a particular country into a large shipping container and then ship that, at a cheap bulk rate, to the country. Once there everything is unpacked and then sent via the local postal service to the buyer. Even if E-bay gets a cheap bulk shipping rate, that's still three different shippers that are involved so I doubt that this would be cheaper than the seller just shipping it directly to the buyer. Assuming that the seller or buyer doesn't insist on one of the over-priced shippers such as UPS., which they often do because of the problems with their national postal service.
OTOH a lot of sellers in the US refuse to sell overseas. Overseas can be a real pitfall with insane customs delays and charges and theft within the postal services in many countries. Just for example, I once shipped a package to Germany. It took almost six months to arrive. AFTER it got to Germany it was shuffled through at least three different customs' offices over a 4 month period and at each location, they cut the package open and inspected it. And each one cut the package open on a different side! The package did finally arrive and everything was intact. I shipped it to a friend of mine and he was patient enough to wait for it. However if that had been an Ebay sale, the buyer would have gone ballistic over the delay! Another time I repaired a small piece of electronics for someone in Italy and I returned to them along with all of the original documentation to show that it had come from Italy. However Italian customs held the package two months and eventually charged the over over $260 US to import it. He was PISSED and he blamed me for all of it and he complained about it for MONTHS. Since then I won't ship anything to Italy.
One more thing. My understanding is that if you don't ship overseas using E-bay's GSP, that E-bay/Pay-Pal will refuse to refund the buyer's money if there is a problem with the shipment! There have been several threads on this forum about that exact subject.
As far as I'm concerned, Ebay's GSP is a racket! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_%28crime%29 I used to sell a lot of stuff on E-bay and probably 60% of it went to Europe and other foreign countries but the shipping cost is so high and there's so many problems (with E-bay in general now) that I gave up selling anything on there.
Stray Electron:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on January 12, 2020, 04:08:06 pm ---Yep... I've found US sellers to have increased international shipping fees to atrocious levels lately... it's pretty sad for us outside of the US, although I can understand.
--- End quote ---
My advice to any of you that are outside of the US is to contact the seller directly and talk to them. If they think that you're a reasonable person then they'll often try to work with you. Also do your homework in advance, you can go the US Postal Service website (or FexEx, or UPS's or DHL's) and get an estimate of what the shipping will be to your country. For most commercial items you can often go to the manufacturer's website and get the weight and dimensions of the item.
One other thing to be aware of, if your packages weighs over about 40 pounds, the shipping rates do up astronomically! I have broken items down into two packages of less than 40 pounds each and the shipping costs dropped by 2/3.
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