Cheap postage

[Naive citizen]

Hi everybody.

Just a matter of general interest. I don't have a business which gets involved with this...

...but how do people and companies offer cheap or free postage on eBay / Amazon when usually paying for postage as a private citizen often costs so much.

You can quite often see sellers based in China for instance who can offer you 5 day shipping for a couple of quid. I know if I tried to post something to China... like anything... it's probably going to cost me a minimum of £15 for something very small.

I can think of some really vague answers to this question... like bulk sellers get postage discounts or whatever... I'm more interested to hear the full story from someone who has first hand experience of accessing these very cheap delivery services.

 

[Solve My Problem]

China have an agreement with the UK, as long as the Chinese side of the postage is paid the UK has to deliver it.

You cannot compete in the UK with this as the rates are more or less the same for everyone (expect very very large sellers and then it's slightly reduced)

RM have a business account called OBA the rates are an average weight, but the rates are still high.

Darren

 

[DontAsk]

It's not a China/UK thing. It applies the world over as Chinese postage rates are effectively subsidised by all the other countries in the postal union as it still deemed to be a "developing country".

Cheap postage can be a dead give away for eBay/Amazon sellers that (falsely) claim to have UK stock.

 

[Naive citizen]

I've used a seller recently on eBay who mixed their address with a location in China and Birmingham in this country. Was the weirdest thing but basically I thought I was safe with the 'UK only' filter applied so bought the item... realised afterwards that it was coming from China... but it arrived quickly and the postage was cheap!

 

[MOIC]

If a China supplier is offering you a 5 day delivery service, then it has to come by air and it’s not cheap. Even the China postal service EMS, (which is the equivalent of RM), are currently more expensive than DHL, FedEx etc. The only cheap transport is by road and that can take between 3-4 weeks.

The likelihood is that the product is being shipped from a European location, where Chinese have huge warehouses. Some have warehouses in UK, but most in Poland, Hungary, Holland & Belgium.

 

[AlanJ1]

I'm more interested to hear the full story from someone who has first hand experience of accessing these very cheap delivery services.

I mean you can get sub £2 for a parcel under 1KG with Hermes (well Evri now) if your volume is huge.

 

[Karimbo]

I can't make sense of some of the prices some ebay sellers charge. I have a product i sell on ebay for £18, after fees I have £15 left and I have to cover the postage, it's a LL items so it costs £1.45. Plus I pay the VAT on £18 which does hurt.

There are other sellers there selling for £9.99 for the same item - i really dont get how they manage that. I know if you can get top spot you will just sell like hot cakes, but still is it worth working like a dog, packing 20x as much stock to make the same profit?

 

[NewTime]

I have a small Amazon business and sometimes you just have to suck up the postage charge due to other sellers.

At the moment I have one item I sell and fortunately I can get the postage for 68p/item and if it's more than one it's even better. Is there any margin in it? Barely, but if you're not the right price, then you're not going to sell it. Hence why I have to suck up the 68p charge.

 

[japancool]

I can't make sense of some of the prices some ebay sellers charge. I have a product i sell on ebay for £18, after fees I have £15 left and I have to cover the postage, it's a LL items so it costs £1.45. Plus I pay the VAT on £18 which does hurt.

There are other sellers there selling for £9.99 for the same item - i really dont get how they manage that. I know if you can get top spot you will just sell like hot cakes, but still is it worth working like a dog, packing 20x as much stock to make the same profit?

That's assuming they're buying at the same price as you. They may have considerably lower buy costs than you do, and just add the postage to the price, while only making a slightly lower margin.

For example, maybe you ship by air, they ship by sea.

 

[Adam Le Grand]

Sorry, just piggy backing this feed (apologies if this is frowned upon) but on a similar line (ish). Can anyone explain how the likes of Parcels2Go work?

Don't get me wrong, I totally get the idea of buying power so they can be cheaper but they seem to complete negate all taxes, duties and local surcharges of all types.

Live example. We sent 5 cartons to China with UPS directly and all in all UPS finally billed us about £175.00 for that shipment.

Needless to say the customer wasn't overly happy with that cost.

They following month the customer booked in exactly the same shipment via Parcels2Go - USING UPS - it ended up costing £68.00 all in.

A) Apart from economies of scale, how are Parcels2Go so cheap?
B) What happens to all the tax, duties and other random surcharges that we were billed retrospectively by UPS before?

We're evening considering just using Parcels2Go for our international shipments as they are so much cheaper and bizarrely the successful arrival rate seems to be higher even though all the usual couriers are being used. I don't know if they go through difference channels in some way which means there is less chance of loss or damage.

 

[NewTime]

Sorry, just piggy backing this feed (apologies if this is frowned upon) but on a similar line (ish). Can anyone explain how the likes of Parcels2Go work?

Don't get me wrong, I totally get the idea of buying power so they can be cheaper but they seem to complete negate all taxes, duties and local surcharges of all types.

Live example. We sent 5 cartons to China with UPS directly and all in all UPS finally billed us about £175.00 for that shipment.

Needless to say the customer wasn't overly happy with that cost.

They following month the customer booked in exactly the same shipment via Parcels2Go - USING UPS - it ended up costing £68.00 all in.

A) Apart from economies of scale, how are Parcels2Go so cheap?
B) What happens to all the tax, duties and other random surcharges that we were billed retrospectively by UPS before?

We're evening considering just using Parcels2Go for our international shipments as they are so much cheaper and bizarrely the successful arrival rate seems to be higher even though all the usual couriers are being used. I don't know if they go through difference channels in some way which means there is less chance of loss or damage.

P2G are a comparison website and I find them to have all the wrong prices anyway

 

[japancool]

P2G are a comparison website and I find them to have all the wrong prices anyway

They're not a comparison site - they're an aggregator. That's why they have different prices compared to booking directly.

 

[AlanJ1]

I know if you can get top spot you will just sell like hot cakes, but still is it worth working like a dog, packing 20x as much stock to make the same profit?

When they sell 2 they only have one postage cost.
When they get top of eBay/Amazon ranks, can then increase price?

 

[japancool]

There are plenty of idiots selling on Amazon and making a 5% margin. Or less.

 

[Adam Le Grand]

P2G are a comparison website and I find them to have all the wrong prices anyway

Yes, I am aware they are a comparison site (that is not supposed to sound condescending, sorry)

Oh really! We have used them a lot in the past, they were our sole international logistics supplier way back when and we've actually always found their service very good. Maybe we've just had good run of luck.