Re: Curious about shipping & cheap items
I have bought many items that come in a regular envelope, or in a very small envelope. A First class letter can be UP TO 3.5oz and 11-1/2" long 6-1/8" high and up to 1/4" thick. The cost for that would be $1.15 retail, there may even be a commercial base discount (I am not sure). Even if it was considered a large envelope, it would only cost $1.64.
Some of these small items in bulk can cost 10 cents or 20 cents each. You probably won't find that price on DHgate or ALiExpress, but if you contact a manufacturer because you want 10,000 pieces, they WILL negotiate a much better price. Alibaba is the place for that.
What I have never been able to figure out is how they are often able to enter TRACKING NUMBERS that eBay will accept. I have ordered items where there is a tracking number in eBay, but it does not show up on the USPS website and a note on the bottom of the listing says their tracking numbers are non-trackable. If you try entering a tracking number into eBay that is incorrect, usually it will reject the number (there is a scheme to tracking numbers where each digit represents something - I don't remember the specifics, but the last digit is a check digit). I'm sure they just re-ship in the event a buyer complains they never received it, so THAT part of it I DO understand, but I don't know how they are able to generate those phake tracking numbers.
I was always meaning to look into this, but decided that I would rather not deal with the ultra-cheap items. If an item sells for $2.50, eBay will get about 25 cents and PayPal charges 30 cents for the transaction plus 2.9%, which works out to about 37 cents. So eBay and PayPal take 62 cents, the USPS takes $1.15, so that is $1.77. If the item costs 23 cents, then the cost for the item is $2 and the profit is 50 cents, which is not bad all things considered. But you have to pack and ship A LOT OF ITEMS to make it worthwhile.
Not to mention, if they have thousands of sales a week, they can use bulk mail, or pre-sorted mail to lessen the cost further. I used retail rates from their website in the example above.
Last edited by jeffweico; 06-24-2015 at 04:53 PM.
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