Something else too,
People are obviously making money on shipping charges.
I mailed a cd and it cost $0.60 at the USPS from CA to MN. Charging $5.00 or more for shipping one CD is just criminal.
I tend to agree, especially since an Ebay seller just quoted me $10 + $2 per card to ship ten VST cards, when all ten in a box wouldn't cost more than $10 total by USPS. However, there are details.
Some sellers will not ship by USPS. They only ship by UPS or Fed Ex. This makes their minimum charge about $7 - $8 for UPS and $10 - $12 for Fed Ex. Why won't they ship USPS? They think the tracking is more reliable with the other companies. It only takes the loss of one or two items to make a seller think hard about not using the postal service any more.
The postal service offers tracking too, but then you're not talking about $.60 any more, you're looking at $4 - $5 and a trip to the post office rather than dropping it in the box.
I had three Beige G3 ROM modules reported lost (never arrived) by customers over the last year. It made me think hard about shipping differently and passing the costs on, of course. But it's just to convenient to me to stick a $.60 stamp on a padded mailer adn drop it in the mailbox at the curb, rather than filling out forms and going to a post office or UPS place. I don't know if all three of those customers were telling the truth or not, but it's worth the loss to avoid shipping all the others in a less convenient manner. To some shippers it isn't worth the loss so they switch to more expensive methods.
And some companies are charging handling which is another way of saying that it takes time to put the stuff in a box. I think the problem there is that individual sellers pretty much "donate" their time to pack things up for sale. As soon as someone starts running that as a business, the time spent packing things up starts to look pretty expensive. It takes a surprising amount of time to get things ready to ship if you want to pack them well.
So, while I also avoid sellers who seem to have excessive shipping charges, I can see where some of them are coming from. It doesn't mean I'm willing to buy from them and support their business model, but I do understand that it is often an attempt to recoup real costs, not an attempt to simply gouge the customer.
Ebay gets a "Final Value Fee" which is about 3% of the selling price of each item sold on Ebay. But they don't get a percentage of the shipping and handling costs (except through PayPal), so shifting the price of an item from the item price to the shipping and handling reduces the Ebay fees paid. Note that PayPal also gets a 3% + $.30 cut of the total that you send by PayPal (4% if the transfer touches outside the USA), so by the time it's all said and done, Ebay is collecting at least 6 - 7% and sometimes more (listing fees) of the total paid for an item. Work this the wrong way and all you're doing as a seller is donating your time to generate fees for Ebay.
There is a place where computer users once bought and sold stuff. It was free and easy to use and folks were at least as honest as on Ebay and it had a better feedback system than Ebay. It's called Usenet or the Newsgroups. Comp.sys.mac.wanted was the primary place for trading but there is also misc.forsale.computers.mac.xxxx, where xxxx represents several categories. The newsgroups are still there, they just aren't used much since Ebay took over. The buyers aren't there any more. It's sad really, because Ebay doesn't provide any customer service, they charge horrid fees, adn they really are not a safer place to trade than just dealing with strangers you find on the internet. But that's where the customers are if you're a seller.
Jeff Walther
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