I always see the Chinese offering free shipping on $0.99 items via eBay and $6 to anywhere for what is $5 here within the States to fellow yanks. How can they offer such dirt cheap shipping when all I can get are $10+ to ship the simplest of things from here to Europe?
Because the Chinese post office is state run, and does not reflect a 1st world country level of expense. In usa a postal employee makes $25-30 an hour. in china they make that in a week probably. Mail is by treaty reciprocal, so all the chinese need to do is get it to the plane and send it over (on a chinese govt airplane). You pay more in the USA because of our level of living expense, wages, and the fact that we don't own the planes we send the mail out on. We pay market costs for everything. Meanwhile in china, national post office sends to national airline, with fuel from national company. Everyone is paid Chinese wages.
Basically the costs are a lot lower than our own due to the fact everyone is underpaid along the way by comparison to the US system. Explains China, but I regularly see shipping costs from Japan, England, Germany and such who are arguably first world countries that are dirt cheap compared to myself using USPS to mail things internationally. At least until I need to ship 50lbs in a flat rate box.
I been trying to find a cheap and reliable way to ship to the UK. Most of my PSX/PSone sales in forums or ebay are to the UK. I use the Flat Rate Priority Box right now.
Well I know for a fact our main mail provider (TNT Holland) is having huge margins on their package shipping prices. You won't believe some of their prices.. If you're sending a package that -say- weights 300grams they'll charge you for a package 'up to 2 KG' just because that's the minimum. Crazy shit.
Airmail in the UK is surprisingly cheap when it's something light. I'm about to send out a remote control + dongle, ~120g, and postage outside the EU (to the US) is only going to be a couple of quid. It only starts to get painful above 2kg. I wasn't aware it's not like that in other places.
I was going to chime in with the same. Anything over 2kg and it is horribly expensive, anything like that I book with a courier. Still couriers are expensive - I shipped a PC-98 to the US and it cost £60. Good thing it was one of high value that had the PC-FX card installed.
