SHOELESSJIM & Vintage Investment ebay situation

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Posted By: davidcycleback

I sell photos in varying sizes and a good percentage of my buyers are foreign. A practical problem for me is I don't know what the shipping charge of a 11x14" photo to Denmark will be until I'm charged at the post office. I can guess if asked, but I don't know what they my shipping charge will be before I ship, in particular when the photo doesn't fit in a standard envelope or box and will be custom packaged. I'm sure what I charge for foreign shipping is less than my cost.

As a seller I look at what the customer paid minus what my total cost (cost of item, paypal charge, eBay charge, shipping charge, etc, etc). Whether shipping cost is $2 or $18 means nothing in and of itself. Shipping is just one of many simultaneous charges, and I don't consider shipping as an independent, special charge. It's buyers who isolate shipping as a unique, special cost. If a buyer insists on lowering shipping charge $5 and raising winning $5, that makes no difference to the seller. The final answer in the above equation remains the same. The seller would be willing to charge you -$27 for shipping, if the final answer remained the same.

I can promise you when someone offers you "Free shipping," the shipping isn't free. The shipping charge/cost is factored into the price you pay. $25 + ($5 shipping) = $30 + (Free shipping). The reason a seller would pick the latter "Free shipping," even when either side of the equation means the same $30, is because he knows buyers are so focused on that shipping charge.



It can be a Rorschach ink blot with sellers and buyers seeing the same thing differently. Say you ask a seller and a buyer to look at the below total sales prices for the same baseball card.

a) Cost = $15 + $2 for shipping; b) Cost = $10 + $7 for shipping.

The seller might say a and b are the same thing, while they buyer might say they're different.