I’ve seen this act going on pretty much since the birth of e-commerce. Compact Flash cards for 99 cents on ebay! 1GB of SDRAM for $20 on newegg! But wait, it’ll cost ya $17.99 to ship it. $17.99 for a 2 ounce, 1 inch by 1 inch by 2mm chip??? C’mon, you can buy a harddrive from newegg and THAT will only cost $4 to ship, and is twice as fragile.
It isn’t just limited to ebay and newegg. I see everybody do it. What’s with this too-good-to-be-true pricing, and outrageous shipping? And of course, they always ship with UPS, so that the actual cost of shipping isn’t printed on the package. I’m willing to bet $17.99 that it cost $3 to ship, and they’re pocketting the rest, hiding it well in their finance ledgers.
No need to hide it. It’s on both sides regardles — expense and revenue. Sometimes, shippers charge a flat fee. While it might be cheaper than the fee to ship to NY, when they get shipments to Hawaii or Singapore, it can cost more. If you want to avoid shipping charges, go to a local supplier and buy the RAM.
Anecdotal, but I’ve heard several people who’s idea of starting their own web-based business included “Sell the crap for pennies and overcharge like hell on the shipping!” or “Shipping costs are where the real money is.”
Ebay takes a bite out of what you sell, but not from the shipping. So sellers charge higher on the “back-end”; that $20 shipping is all profit as opposed to giving eBay a percentage of the $15.00 and using the $5.00 to actually ship. This is considered fee avoidence, but good luck getting eBay to do anything about it. Secondly, you need to look at the total cost. If you’re getting a bargin, does it matter how it’s broken down? $20 is $20. Use a credit card and you should be fine.
Secondly, if you do a little research, you can find places that ship for free www.zipzoomfly.com is one of my favorite places to purchase stuff. Free 2-day air and good prices. I use www.fatwallet.com as a quick way to see prices vs shipping from on-line vendors. Sometimes EVEN with shipping + tax included, you can find a real bargin, but you need to look.
I just went to newegg and didn’t see anything unusual about the shipping charges on SDRAM, nothing like $20 for memory, more like $5 or free. What am I missing? Of course, none of the memory was $20 for 1Gb either…
eBay sellers do this as a way to defraud eBay. eBay only gets money for the sale price, not the shipping, so you bump up the shipping as your real price and “sell” it for next to nothing.
okay, this is the legitamite question - why do I see this act of defraud almost exclusively when it comes to memory? Even on ebay, shipping costs are usually pretty fair, except when it comes to RAM and memory cards.
and maybe newegg’s shaped up since last time I bought RAM from them, but they pulled the same trick on me about a year ago, when I bought a 1GB stick for $20 and then got charged almost as much to ship it.
I’ve been buying from newegg for a long time, and purchased a lot of items from them, and I have never, ever seen a 1 GB stick of RAM for $20. I’ve also never seen an Express Saver shipping charge of $20 for a stick of RAM. About the only time I’ve seen a shipping charge that high was when I had a whole bunch of stuff sent overnight shipping, and that was $25 on about $500 worth of hardware.
The shipping prices on eBay is a joke, throughout the site; not just in RAM. Visit the Shipping Forum sometime to see how many problems there are…hell I think eBay has finally started to acknowledge what “reasonable” is supposed to mean; it’s gotten that bad. Wear your flame-proof clothes.
Another reason for eBay people having high shipping rates is to not only avoid eBay fees, but also to get more money from you. This occurs less often, but often enough that I avitively avoid it. In the description, they don’t mention what the shipping cost is. Then, when you have the winning bid with $5, they inform you shipping will be over $20. And then, not wanting to be a non-paying bidder and figure $25 is what you would pay for the item normally with reasonable shipping, you pay. And then it arrives in the worst box, beaten to hell, not packed well, and broken, and they won’t refund your money.
Look, I overcharge for shipping to gain an extra buck or two, we all do. But when I do, I still, ALWAYS list the shipping cost in the auction, and ALWAYS pack it very well, and I am still well under what I charged. Boxes and packing suppies are cheap, so if you charge $20 for shipping, please use at least a few of those dollars to actually ship it, and not just toss it in a mailbox and hope it arrives.
I never overcharge on shipping. I weigh my item before I put it up for auction. I figure out how much it would cost me to ship to Califonia (the state that is the furthest from my location) and enter that shipping cost + what it cost me for shipping materials. I only ship in the continetal US for the set shipping price.
You’re a better man than I. But I have no scale, am bad at just “guessing” what something weighs, and so I just look at something and go,
“Eh, I guess it will cost somewhere in the $3-$5 range.” So I charge $5 just to make sure I don’t undercharge. Like I said, though, I always list what I charge for shipping in the uaction, so they have no right to complain, unless it’s crazy outrageous and make them decide to not bid.
So…does this mean that there might be a change in the future to avoid auctions like I looked at today? I want one of 3M’s restickable glue sticks - they make any paper restickable like a post-it - and I saw one on ebay for 89 cents. Great, I thought. Except the shipping on said 89 cent glue stick was $14.95. Are you kidding me?! I thought $17 shipping on $20 external floppy drives was bad, but this takes the cake.