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Long ago ebay stepped into the world of shipping charges by adding freight costs to the final value calculations. Don’t remember the exact timeline, but once paypal became common, and the totals of all transactions were obvious, ebay had a comprehensive view so it was easy to do.
The motivation seemed to have been to put pressure on sellers who were heavily loading their transactions with outrageous shipping costs, solely to avoid paying ebay. (this practice has largely declined, but just last week I saw a seller who had their item (weight about 10 ounces) up for auction for $1 with a $28 shipping charge. )
Jump ahead today and it has been assumed that buyers LOVE free shipping, so sellers have to mark up or adjust manually to compensate for their cost, “there is no such thing as free shipping”…
But when I shop or research I still see maybe 75% of sellers do NOT have free shipping.
So, scrolling along with the “lowest price + shipping gives the buyer items ranked as the total amount – some item + shipping, some total “free” shipping. This is exactly like the Amazon listings – Prime is $x.xx,free shipping, but there are marketplace listings above and below, many of which list shipping.
Hey! Mr BTSTiki! GET TO THE POINT!!!
OK.
ebay automatically does the calculations for shipping. List something with weight, dimensions, shipping carrier, and they communicate this automatically on every listing. EVERY LISTING. They know every buyers zip code. They calculate. They are in the purchase of freight, they charge fees on the freight.
they could easily make the vast majority of listings “Free freight” by simply DISPLAYING A NET TOTAL to the buyer and removing the calculation from the display.
everyone gets free freight!
Right? What am I missing? Everyone is happy. ebay markets free shipping, buyers don’t think about it since they see only a net cost, sellers don’t change their process. ebay gets their cut
WHAT AM I MISSING???????
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this was something that jay mentioned a couple weeks ago as well.
since ebay can and does calculate shipping prices real-time on the page, why not just show total prices for everything in search?instead of 19.99 + 6.50
show 26.49 as the total price-
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We certainly would buy into this. As you already know we build the shipping cost for Zone 8 into all of our Free Shipping items, which is mostly First Class but some are heavier. We have some 4 and 5 lb. items as Free Shipping and we have a $15 to $20 shipping charge built in. On top of that we also pad by another 30% to allow for Sales and Offers either singularly or combined. So correct… No such thing as Free Shipping.
But if Ebay showed the Total Price to the customer, these dollar amounts “would still be added in” because “There is no such thing as Free Shipping”. All of us and Jay can say this over and over and it is correct. We buy for a dollar amount, mark that up 5 to 10 times [depending], then add a 40% mark up on this so we can do a 20% off Sale and also take a 20% lower price offer at the same time the Sale is running, then add zone 8 shipping on top of that. Seems to not bother those who really want our more unusual, rare or unique items.
But having Ebay roll all this into one lump sum for the buyer doesn’t remove the labor burden for a seller that should be weighing, measuring and calculating freight costs at the time of listing.
We have a system that has allowed us to only miss the real shipping costs a few times over the past several years.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
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