OT: Excessive shipping - does ebay care?

[unamuzd1]

Excessive shipping? Try clicking the "You won!" button in an email and getting this gem...



Okay, so it was a typo when the seller went to combine shipping, and it got fixed within 2 minutes of me sending message to let the seller know... but I about keeled over when I saw my total!

[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 ?

[savedfrommyspokes]

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 ?

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.

[bbcardzman]

Bottom Line: EBay cares only about $ and not about the sellers who make it for them.

[jcc6252]

VCP does not handle shipping variances correctly. Depending on the amount, excessive shipping charges can greatly skew the VCP price of a card. For example, if a $20 card sells for $15, plus $5 shipping, VCP records it as a $15 sale. If it sells for $20, with free shipping, the sales price now becomes $20. Basically, VCP is flawed, and should be using the grand total.

[D. Bergin]

Originally Posted by jcc6252

VCP does not handle shipping variances correctly. Depending on the amount, excessive shipping charges can greatly skew the VCP price of a card. For example, if a $20 card sells for $15, plus $5 shipping, VCP records it as a $15 sale. If it sells for $20, with free shipping, the sales price now becomes $20. Basically, VCP is flawed, and should be using the grand total.

Then you would have all the instances where a single buyer buys a bunch of cards from the same seller at once in order to combine shipping. (ex. they buy 5 $15 cards from the same buyer, and is charged $5-$7 for the same shipment).

Are you going to tack on the initial $5.00 charge to each card? I don't think VCP has a magical software tool to access the actual charged invoices of every individual purchase. Best to keep it as simple as possible. Only thing I can think to do would be to automatically knock a couple bucks off the price of FREE SHIPPING sales, to bring things a bit more in line.

[jcc6252]

Good point!

[D. Bergin]

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 ?

It's fine with BIN prices. If you are running true auctions it's a lot trickier.