The shipping rates are certainly weird, and I do think they should be reviewed, although I think the internal rates are too high, but I admittedly don't know the cost structure.
They would probably be cheaper if they weren't subsidizing postal rates for other countries.
I find it amusing when you have a problem on AliExpress and the seller suggests you mail it back to them. Unless the product has a very high value it almost always costs more than the product's value to send it back to China.
Luckily AliExpress customer service seems to realize this and will often grant refunds without requiring you to return the product.
eBay really sucks on this regard; it's very difficult to get a refund for a defective item without paying handsomely to ship it back.
We stopped selling in Europe because resellers would place an order, never pay for it, and we couldn't force them to because of some certification we didn't have.
Management didn't want to spend $20,000 getting certified to sell in Europe, so we basically bowed out of the market and now miss out in millions in sales.
For the record I think a lot of European regulations are needlessly anti-business but this seems like an odd example. If management isn't willing to spend $20k (even on credit at onerous interest) to make millions of dollars, I don't think they'll be around very long.
> “The cost to ship a one-pound package from South Carolina to New York City would run nearly $6; from Beijing to NYC: $3.66.”
> While sending that same one-pound package from New York City back to Beijing via USPS International Mail would cost in the ballpark of $50.
Someone should really do something about this!
He found he could import 300 widgets from China and have them landed in Toronto for a shipping fee of roughly $17. To ship that same set of widgets from Toronto to a store two cities away was going to cost him $349.
In fact for $17, he could send 1 widget within the same city he was in directly to a customer.
It gets even worse if he wants to send that package of widgets to the states for something like Amazon FBA. Once again, it would cost $17 to ship directly from China but would run him $1400 from Toronto to New York.
What surprises me today is that nothing seems to have changed yet. Last year it was rumoured that the free ride would gradually end starting this year, but so far the Chinese retailers don't seem to be impacted much — shipping costs are effectively zero for customers in Europe and North America.
If you are unfamiliar with this weird side-effect of the global economy, it helps explain why brick-and-mortar shops selling cheap Chinese stuff for mere cents can exist with a meaningful profit margin.
And there is - just for the record - a perverse incentive to multiply packages.
Here in Italy there is an import duty exemption set at 22 Euros, so what often happens with free shipping via Postal Service (unlike what you would do on local (EU) online stores, where you try to get as much as you can from a same seller to minimize postage and handling) is that people order single items from different vendors, so that each single packet is lower than 22 Euros, and they have the bonus of being sure not to pay any import duty.
Can't Amazon, Wal-Mart and Macys counter the influence of Alibaba on the US government? If not, what the heck. Time to emigrate.
There's a way to solve this problem.
How about adding an inspection at ports of entry for these packages? The inspections would verify sender addresses, consumer safety, and other compliance with receiving-country regulations.
It should be possible to get packages through the inspection process reasonably efficiently. If shippers had the expectation that these ePacket items would clear inspection in something like 120 days, that should work.
It would serve the needs of customers who really need the cheapest stuff, preserve safety regulation compliance, and give customers an incentive to buy from merchants closer to home.
This is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but not really.
https://archive.fo/HafaR (page 1)
https://archive.fo/UyA29 (page 2)
I think a very large problem is that the packages are non standardised which prevents them from being sorted by machine easily.
But there are other entrepreneurs who are profiting from this disparity too and never mentioned in the article - the dropshippers. People are able to sell stuff easily without having to worry about warehousing, shipping etc
How can this be? I thought usps was self sufficient?
The lighter blue line is in May 2016 cents.
Compared with the service’s losses of $5 _billion_ this doesn’t strike me as an actual outrage.
