Quote:
Originally Posted by Jewish-collector
My apologies for the stupid question, but why can't sellers just always do free shipping and just add their shipping fee to the starting price or BIN price ?
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If you are looking to buy just a single card from a seller at a time, than free s/h is a great idea.
However, as a collector, I try to buy as many cards from one seller at a time in order to minimize my s/h costs. So I look to sellers who charge a set fee (say $3) to ship no matter how many cards are purchased or free s/h once a quantity/$ threshold is achieved. I typically do not buy multiple cards from the free s/h sellers as I do not enjoy paying the embedded s/h cost on each item.
As an example, I find a free s/h seller offering 20 cards I am considering for a set I am building. Typically $1 cards, the free s/h seller offers them for $2 each in order to cover their s/h. My total (with free s/h) for these 20 cards is $40. I find another seller with the same 20 cards being offered. However, this seller offers a $3 s/h cap and sells the cards for $1 each. My total with this seller is $23.
I am surprised when sellers who offer lower priced cards (commons) using the free s/h format. It works great for single card purchases, but what seller prefers to sell just one card at a time when they could be selling 15-20 at one time.
In regards to excessive s/h charged by sellers, ebay is not going to police their own rule about excessive s/h as they do not pay out ebay bucks on s/h, the ebay bucks are earned only on the cost of the item itself. You would think ebay would be encouraging sellers to not offer free s/h as they end up paying out more in rewards to the buyers when free s/h is used. In addition, TRS still pay 9% on the s/h charges and do not receive their 20% FVF discount on s/h FVFs. So it is certainly to eBay's benefits to allow higher s/h based on the rewards that do not have to be paid and the discounts on fees that do not have to be offered.