What on earth is going on !!!

[Chris Ashdown]

Tonight I have paid £2.10 with free delivery on ebay for 4 small spring clamps, which is being delivered on the 7th from somewhere in England, there was 10 shops selling the same thing and I could have gone for the more expensive ones at £2.75 again with free delivery

However they pack them, it must be larger than the small letter rate

To be a Capitalist, do you also have to be stupid at basic maths and not able to understand the word profit, or am I just totally out of the modern world

 

[Its4john]

Have a look at the business seller details. Are they Chinese ? Lots of Chinese sellers are shipping containers of tones of stuff then drop it in a uk warehouse from where it’s shipped out.
I’m guessing minimum markup and maybe some tax invasion from some of these operators.

 

[alan1302]

Someone trying to make a living on volume and making pennies per item - expect they won't last very long but someone else will take their place. If you look on eBay there is a lot like it.

 

[Mr D]

Tonight I have paid £2.10 with free delivery on ebay for 4 small spring clamps, which is being delivered on the 7th from somewhere in England, there was 10 shops selling the same thing and I could have gone for the more expensive ones at £2.75 again with free delivery

However they pack them, it must be larger than the small letter rate

To be a Capitalist, do you also have to be stupid at basic maths and not able to understand the word profit, or am I just totally out of the modern world

Royal mail account parcel the basic off the top of my head is £2.72 including VAT. With volume its less, with lots of volume its even lower.

Check the packaging when it arrives. Have heard over the years multiple instances of sellers sending some packages using large letter rate.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Just think of the logistics to do this though

• Load up a container of a few thousand from stock
• Pay for container to port
• ship to uk
• Pay import duty
• transport from dock to warehouse
• Unload into warehouse
• Place orders on EBay and pay fees
• take money and label up goods
• post

How much left of hundreds of £2.10

 

[Mr D]

Just think of the logistics to do this though

• Load up a container of a few thousand from stock
• Pay for container to port
• ship to uk
• Pay import duty
• transport from dock to warehouse
• Unload into warehouse
• Place orders on EBay and pay fees
• take money and label up goods
• post

How much left of hundreds of £2.10

Yes. However at times a seller can think of getting rid of old stock. May even reduce down to cost price. Still won't sell - maybe even drop below cost price.
I'd expect that last to be rare, have had to do it myself with one range.

Would not expect someone to drop below the postage & packing cost price though if fiddling the postage.....?

 

[Furqan721]

Sellers from China Ruining ebay pricing!

 

[JEREMY HAWKE]

Buy cheap you will only be let down
One of those springs might break and wack you on the nose

 

[The Byre]

Not if he sits on it, it won't!

 

[Mr D]

Sellers from China Ruining ebay pricing!

From a buyers point of view no.

As an ebay seller I've been competing with Chinese seller for years, no more a threat than American sellers.
EU sellers are more of a threat as of course are UK sellers.

 

[Mr D]

Buy cheap you will only be let down
One of those springs might break and wack you on the nose

Cheap can work.
Just replaced my mouse for the laptop last week, £4.99. The previous one lasted a mere 5 years, again a cheap mouse. Around £4 back then.

 

[Furqan721]

From a buyers point of view no.

As an ebay seller I've been competing with Chinese seller for years, no more a threat than American sellers.
EU sellers are more of a threat as of course are UK sellers.

Hey,

I was talking about seller point of view. On ebay suppose, The thing we are selling, chinese sellers are selling the same product at like 50% of our price.

Their product may not be of the same quality but their photo shoot shows they have better quality and price is also half of what we selling. So buyers prefer them.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

I assume they have a royal mail business account with drop off at local post office. Most Post offices do not check paperwork and quantity. They make some daily orders and drop off more than they pay for. Simple as that. I noticed it since I use a royal mail business account and their OBA system goes sometimes down I print a label for a parcel and drop it off to pay for it. On more than 1 occasion I had to fight to pay for it. Staff just took it and told me it is paid pair I said no they said yes. That happened more than once so I can assume if you drop of a royal mail bag at the post office pay for 10 but have 20 in there they wont even bother to check. Hence those sellers do not pay for postage at all or way less. Also they might sell below price to increase listing ranking and than bump up the price later and have it as marketing costs down.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

Also there was a big ebay seller that got caught with it:
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=5489967

Babz Media was the business in question:

https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2134077/babz-media-ebay-seller

 

[Mr D]

Hey,

I was talking about seller point of view. On ebay suppose, The thing we are selling, chinese sellers are selling the same product at like 50% of our price.

Their product may not be of the same quality but their photo shoot shows they have better quality and price is also half of what we selling. So buyers prefer them.

Do they get all the buyers?

Better quality and lower price, what is there for buyers not to like?

Or do you get some?

 

[Gecko001]

A couple of years ago I bought a set of replacement motor brushes for a Bosch circular saw. I thought ebay was a bit too expensive at about £5.00. - motor brushes are quite small and very low tech. I searched the Interweb and found a set selling at, I think, $1.25 including P&P on an American site. I ordered them paid by paypal. 92p came out of my paypal account Two or three weeks later I received the brushes in the post in a package with a green customs sticker on it in Chinese! I would imagine they were dropshipped from China by the US company I bought them from. The shoe leather used by all the people involved alone would probably cost more than I paid.

 

[Bronco78th]

I despise eBay (but sadly have to work on it) largely because of the way it allows the chinese sellers in particular to get away with murder.

Came across a gem of a listing last week. Iphone 6 over 1000 sales....dirt cheap.

The listing made a Big deal of being a UK seller in the subtitle and had gone to great lengths in the text to back this up.....shipped from UK warehouses. UK seller, UK VAT registered (thats a blatant lie, no numbers shown) etc...

Anyway scroll to the item specifics.....all in German...I kid you not. Ok so they are selling on ebay.de and its one of eBays long standing and incompetent technical faults...benefit of the doubt.

Description again all about how wonderfully british it all is.

Go to Seller profile "xxxxxxx is a retailer based in Hong Kong"

Reported it to ebay because its blatant lies....listing still online...."ebay can't disclose what action they have asked the seller to take" was what I received.....they don't give a toss about the trading rules being broken within the UK......they don't exactly pay tax themselves so screw everyone else as long as they get there 15% cut who cares what laws and tax dodging is going on.

I for one cannot wait for the day for eBay to crash and burn....the way they treat there sellers is a disgrace, most of the screens and systems are out of date or barely function (a text editor that works on all browsers would be nice eBay!) and the whole thing is just a shambles......considering the high fees as well.

 

[Dimo]

Here's one option that's been employed in the past - not to be recommended - the seller uses counterfeit RM stamps, so postage is dirt cheap. There are lots of forgeries about, and now people are selling counterfeit booklets on Ebay at highly inflated prices to stamp collectors.

 

[Mr D]

I despise eBay (but sadly have to work on it) largely because of the way it allows the chinese sellers in particular to get away with murder.

Came across a gem of a listing last week. Iphone 6 over 1000 sales....dirt cheap.

The listing made a Big deal of being a UK seller in the subtitle and had gone to great lengths in the text to back this up.....shipped from UK warehouses. UK seller, UK VAT registered (thats a blatant lie, no numbers shown) etc...

Anyway scroll to the item specifics.....all in German...I kid you not. Ok so they are selling on ebay.de and its one of eBays long standing and incompetent technical faults...benefit of the doubt.

Description again all about how wonderfully british it all is.

Go to Seller profile "xxxxxxx is a retailer based in Hong Kong"

Reported it to ebay because its blatant lies....listing still online...."ebay can't disclose what action they have asked the seller to take" was what I received.....they don't give a toss about the trading rules being broken within the UK......they don't exactly pay tax themselves so screw everyone else as long as they get there 15% cut who cares what laws and tax dodging is going on.

I for one cannot wait for the day for eBay to crash and burn....the way they treat there sellers is a disgrace, most of the screens and systems are out of date or barely function (a text editor that works on all browsers would be nice eBay!) and the whole thing is just a shambles......considering the high fees as well.

As often the biggest online marketplace for 3rd party sales I can't see them crashing and burning any time soon.

They have improved a lot in past few years, 15 years ago they were pretty bad and was like the wild west. These days a lot more protection for buyers and sellers.
Much to the annoyance of some sellers.

Now if you want high fees, try and auction house. Or amazon. Or a shop.
Ebay fees are not bad, can make more from ebay sales in a day after fees than I can with a stall on a busy market.

 

[Page]

Tonight I have paid £2.10 with free delivery on ebay for 4 small spring clamps, which is being delivered on the 7th from somewhere in England, there was 10 shops selling the same thing and I could have gone for the more expensive ones at £2.75 again with free delivery

To be a Capitalist, do you also have to be stupid at basic maths and not able to understand the word profit, or am I just totally out of the modern world

I have bought other items with the same baffling situation. Where we could not even post the item within the UK for what it has cost me and it has come all the way from China.
Let along fund the channel fees and VAT and handling costs etc

My last and most spectacular one was a 7 day plastic pill box for 60p that is about 1.5cm deep

If we put this spectacular exception to one side then other things are still coming in below postage within the UK cost

Some of it might be maths errors - some of it might be new sellers looking to get established and some feedback behind them just like we used to do - or to give the product boost up the rankings before they put the price up - but I am not sure about that one being true on these mega cheap items because there are so many at a similar low price

I did wonder if it was a way of getting money out of China - and into the west

Related but to one side nearly every item I bought in the last quarter was either from Amazon themselves or a chinese seller with a UK VAT registration

 

[The Byre]

Remember that the international postal agreement means that all postage is collected by the sending country and nearly all the costs are in delivery.

Postage from China -

Even if the Chinese postal service has to pay the regular $2,500 per 40' container, the amount per small package is as close to nothing as you could imagine. That is about 250,000 small packages moved to the UK for 1 cent per package.

There is a formula and mechanism for redressing the massive imbalance between the staggering mass of mail from China to the West, but it hardly makes much difference. Even if the Chinese vendor sends only ONE item to the West, it still costs much less than half as much as the INTERNAL mail of the cheapest Western countries - if we now factor in the rebates for bulk delivery, you begin to see why goods can move from China to the EU and US for tiny sums and still generate huge profits for all concerned.

They manufacture a garlic press for 5 cents and send it to the West for 5 cents and then charge $1.50 or 99p. You are amazed that they can do it so cheaply - they are amazed that they can get so much mark-up!

 

[Chris Ashdown]

It does not explain the china companies though who then use Royal Mail to send from when it arrives in the UK, but then as you say lots of pennies make lots of pounds and with foreign money a small % profit can work, just look at the supermarkets hone items

 

[Mr D]

Remember that the international postal agreement means that all postage is collected by the sending country and nearly all the costs are in delivery.

Postage from China -

Even if the Chinese postal service has to pay the regular $2,500 per 40' container, the amount per small package is as close to nothing as you could imagine. That is about 250,000 small packages moved to the UK for 1 cent per package.

There is a formula and mechanism for redressing the massive imbalance between the staggering mass of mail from China to the West, but it hardly makes much difference. Even if the Chinese vendor sends only ONE item to the West, it still costs much less than half as much as the INTERNAL mail of the cheapest Western countries - if we now factor in the rebates for bulk delivery, you begin to see why goods can move from China to the EU and US for tiny sums and still generate huge profits for all concerned.

They manufacture a garlic press for 5 cents and send it to the West for 5 cents and then charge $1.50 or 99p. You are amazed that they can do it so cheaply - they are amazed that they can get so much mark-up!

Or the Western businesses can buy the stuff from overseas, import it and have considerable markup.
20p purchase price in China becomes £2.99 retail price here.
£58 purchase price elsewhere overseas with a £8 box added becomes a £1000 item to the end customer.

Its not just the Chinese making money.

 

[deniser]

Here's one option that's been employed in the past - not to be recommended - the seller uses counterfeit RM stamps, so postage is dirt cheap. There are lots of forgeries about, and now people are selling counterfeit booklets on Ebay at highly inflated prices to stamp collectors.

Yes my friend who works at the post office had told me about a person who used forged RM PPI labels and dropped parcels off at many different small post offices to avoid detection. He did get caught in the end.

 

[webgeek]

You sell a few hundred low cost items with minimal margins - get great feedback and then start selling 500 quid items that you don't bother shipping as you churn and burn your ebay account, leveraging that great feedback to scam the heck out of people.

Happens all the time. I don't like it, but don't know how to stop it.

 

[AWA Training]

They do volume sales. Lets not forget in China workers are paid a lot less.
Quality is questionable as well.
So they knock these out in their 1000s, the aim is then probably to sell the container before it reaches blighty.

I suppose its like some selling books on Amazon for a penny each. Postage costs more than the book.

 

[Gordon - Commercial Finance]

I once paid £1.88 and free postage for an item, which never arrived. I didn't even notice for like 2 months. When I asked for a refund, I got it straight away, and I ordered an alternative...and the exact same thing happened.
I think that in some cases people list very cheap items which they have no intention of ever fulfilling, hoping that people won't notice that it has never arrived, or won't care enough about the £1.88 to follow it up. I don't notice when I don't have £1.88, but someone who sells 5,000 of these items and never ships them has just made a decent bit of cash for little work.

 

[monaghan]

Would be much better if they were honest about it. I ordered something the other week, choosing the seller who said item located in Bedford and a few days delivery time over the ones with a UK location and long lead time, the thing finally arrived today with a Chinese style customs label.

 

[Scott Smith]

I agree that Chinese market is a global threat, but applying basic mathematics before buying or selling is always a best practice.