Ebay was such a great idea when it started. It was a place for regular old Jacks and Jills like you and me to pick up an occasional bargain or to unload Uncle Fred's old straight razor that he left you when he died. (How come Freda got the farm, I wonder?) I guess we should have expected it to be corrupted. Why should the world have a good thing?
There are a lot of scams on EBAY. People sell shit they don't own. People sell fake shit. People sell pirated shit. There's not a lot us Jacks and Jill can do about that. But the one scam we CAN do something about is the inflated shipping charge scam. If you're an EBAY'er, you've seen it. A stick of memory is only $19.95, but in the fine print you see that S&H is $34.95. We all know that to pay Staples a buck for a shipping box the right size, to pay USPS for first class mail or UPS for ground shipping and the cost for paper and toner to print up an invoice won't go past four bucks for an item that size. The bozo listing the memory is padding his profit by thirty bucks. EBAY hasn't exhibited the rudimentary intelligence it requires to see that this is not only defrauding the customer, it's cheating them out of commissions they should be earning on that thirty bucks in profit.
On this page, I'm going to collect a listing of EBAY sellers who charge more than 150% of actual shipping and handling charges. In considering whether to add a seller to this list, I will take into account subsidiary items such as packaging materials. I will NOT consider travel to and from the Post Office or UPS location. USPS picks up and delivers every day. And UPS is on its way the day after you call them and tell them you have a pickup. They don't charge an extra nickel for this service. I know because I do it all the time.
Being on this list does not make a seller a crook or a criminal. I'm not a judge or jury, and am not in a position to make that call. All it means is that they post EBAY listings and charge FAR more than actual costs to ship an item. I derived estimated costs by going to a retail site and finding out what that seller charges to ship the same item. Where a seller requires insurance, that amount has been included in the total charge.
I suggest we all band together and boycott these sellers until they back away from this insidious practice.
