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
$2.95 shipping is plenty for a bubble mailer with a game case in it. Additionally, there’s tons of fraudulent packages right now and the instruction from management is to just deliver it even if you catch it.
Ive never seen a bubble mailer cost less than $5.40 as a seller and that’s with ebays discount, im talking 2 ounces
You could be right. I know delivery better than postage pricing. Seeing $2.95 on a label wouldn’t trigger any red flags to me.
Depends where you are but for us if it fits in a 6x9 envelope and is thinner that a certain height ( I forget 5/8" maybe. Then it ships for a couple of dollars. As soon as thickness goes over that limit is becomes like $20
What service is that? Cant be ground advantage which starts at 4.50
If it’s non machinable (rigid) then it has to go ground advantage, etc.
Im in Canada, so 6x9 under 50g is $1.75 I think. Higher rate for heavier.
Wow what an amazing deal, sucks to be in the us i guess
Yeah my sister sent me a thin spring jacket across country, in one of those envelopes before. Cost her $2. But as soon as you exceed what they determine is a letter slots thickness, it jumps to $20+ bcause now they can’t drop it through a mail slot and needs an actual delivery
I think the bigger companies have special deals in shipping. Might also be their postal printer they have through a 3rd party company.
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.
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?
Ding ding ding! We have a winner! Yes, that is exactly why!
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?
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
