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How are people making any money selling shipping for 2.95? Is this a hack I don't know about? (media.piefed.social)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/flipping@lemmy.world
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I know eBay has "eBay envelope" for like certain collectibles but that's limited by category (that service also has never worked for me), so perhaps this seller just has a custom shipping rule that is that low? But they would lose money on a sale like this. I suppose the hope could be that people buy multiple items at once if they have plenty of (in this case) retro games

Edited - added screen shot of low end rate costs for ground advantage and media mail

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[–] 2 points 4 months ago* (4 children)

In the us the postal service has media mail, bit this seems low even for that. It's likely they are in a member nation of the UN's universal postal union (192 members!). One of the agreements between members is to deliver or forward on mail from all other UPU members. This can appear initially as a financial loss due to the postage rates and volumes from/to some member jurisdictions, but the members reimburse each other and various fees are assessed. This is a vastly oversimplified explanation, but it's an incredibly convoluted system even after many many revisions. The Wikipedia page for the UPU goes into some history and much more detail. The section Terminal Dues give more detail better than I can. The subsection on Modifications specifically but there are only two relatively brief subsections under Terminal Dues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Interesting idea, I wonder is this why packages from cheap chinese sellers are a thing? For this particular eBay listing - I found this company's headquarters in Miami, FL so probably not the case here?

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Ding ding ding! We have a winner! Yes, that is exactly why!

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I bought an item from the seller and in the upper right hand corner it says "US POSTAGE PAID GLOBAL MAIL USPS SHIP" - but the company is based in FL - wild I wonder how they got approved for this? But this must mean they are paying that international rate right?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Because they either source, warehouse, or on-demand fabricate overseas. This was kind of shopify's original model, remember when suddenly everybody knew what drop shipping was? Anybody could make a virtual store and you didn't have to buy the product until the moment you made a sale and the wholesaler will "drop-ship" it directly to the customer, meaning the seller isn't part of fulfillment. Welcome to just one part of the economics that made that cheap enough to be viable, and it was sold to their customers as a low risk way to get started. But if you look carefully the responsibilities are structured in such a way that liability is on the you the customer and very briefly the fulfiller, who immediately hands liability over to the postal services, at a significant discount, until finally it reaches you. This is capitalism 101, risk is mitigated by placing a structural intermediary. Think about the gig economy, if all these people are contractors then they inherit a significant burden in the form of those additional liabilities. That's why they fight tooth and mail to not have them classified as employees

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