eBay-what do you consider to be far P+P charges

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adidat

I will not buy anymore tools...
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two items i have bought recently have both cost about £5 to post them, with both sellers charging about £2.50 for packaging. am i missing something here.

when i sell i try and add about 50p to cover packaging and getting it to the post office, i can achieve this by recycling packaging and not making a special trip to the post office |(e.g. charging for petrol and ware and tare). and so far all my star ratings are above 4.6.

surely i should not be paying for some one's time spent packaging the item, or there want to use brand new packaging. or paying more for the item that was bought for as little as the seller allowed.

or should i be charging more for my p+p, no one is forcing me to buy the item eg. a record no 070 box scraper how was i to know it weighed less then 750g costing the seller £2.70 at the PO.

should i ask for a refund or should i just except it and move on (and stop being a miser)

adidat
 
You should take their P+P charges into account before bidding :shock: Your not on your own here I often pass on rippoff postage items.
 
+1

I too often pass on items with high p&p. Seams to me that people often lost 99p start items and then add what they want to make into the p&p, so you pay maybe a couple of quid for the item but a hefty mark up at the postage. eBay should look into this I think.
 
I charge what it costs me, rounded up to include packaging and Paypal charges, so £2.20 becomes £2.50 for example.
If I think someone's overcharging for their postage I either don't bid, bid lower or try and get them to lower their charge based on what I'd expect to charge.
 
I've just sold a few things on EBay and one thing I have learnt is that it is difficult to estimate the postage and you don't get the correct figure until you pack them up?
Also it depends on their value - Recorded Signed For only insures up to £46 and that costs £3.65 for a small item. Anything over that requires Special Delivery and a cost of £6.35.

Rod
 
the way i see it, there is no way i could have known the item i bought weighed less then 750g had the item weighed a 1kg or less then the price would still be OTT. maybe i should approach the seller for some money back, its a principle thing its Postage & Packaging, not Postage & Packaging & Profit

adidat
 
It's not just eBay sellers that overcharge. I found many shops/dealers/stockists can be even worse - just paid £6.99 delivery for something that will only cost half of that.

I always quote low on P/P fro my eBay sales and often find I've lost out a few pence ... but I do have 5 stars for all eBay's DSR ratings. :)
 
When selling on ebay I usually type the description first,then package the item and weigh it on the kitchen/bathroom scales before going on to the Royal Mail postage calculator (follow the links from ebay) then add on the packaging cost - I generally round it up to the nearest 50p.

This way I can get a reasonably accurate idea of the postage cost before completing the listing. If it's slightly over then I have a few pence less profit. Big deal! Excessive P&P costs put me off items straight away.

Mark
 
RogerP":39pmx9ak said:
It's not just eBay sellers that overcharge. I found many shops/dealers/stockists can be even worse - just paid £6.99 delivery for something that will only cost half of that.
I've less of an issue with that as they are a commercial organisation and you're paying for someone's time to pack it, post it and new packing materials. I still might look elsewhere though.
 
cambournepete":2rjm67k9 said:
RogerP":2rjm67k9 said:
It's not just eBay sellers that overcharge. I found many shops/dealers/stockists can be even worse - just paid £6.99 delivery for something that will only cost half of that.
I've less of an issue with that as they are a commercial organisation and you're paying for someone's time to pack it, post it and new packing materials. I still might look elsewhere though.

And probably VAT on the postage.
 
deserter":b9txl1mv said:
eBay should look into this I think.
There was a time when you could apply whatever P&P charges you liked, but eBay cottoned onto this (no sellers fees on P&P) and eBay are now pretty strict on what you can charge, with 'known' items having a preset P&P that you can't exceed e.g. my son recently helped a friend sell a PS3 and according to the 'postage calculator' on eBay it was going to cost £18 in postage alone, but eBay wouldn't allow P&P to exceed £17.

adidat":b9txl1mv said:
when i sell i try and add about 50p to cover packaging and getting it to the post office, i can achieve this by recycling packaging and not making a special trip to the post office...
I think it's a bit optimistic to expect everyone else to take this thrifty attitude. When I'm selling on eBay I try to charge enough to ensure that i cover my costs - sometimes I get it just right, sometimes I make a couple of quid, and sometimes it costs me a couple of quid; so it goes. <shrug>

Just out of interest, how was the item packed, and what did it actually cost to post? Were you buying new from a trader/commercial organisation, or just from an individual shifting some used odds & ends after a clearout?

adidat":b9txl1mv said:
should i ask for a refund or should i just except it and move on (and stop being a miser)
Assuming P&P costs were clearly stated in the listing, then you already accepted it by bidding on the item; time to move on, I think.
 
petermillard":3r32grea said:
deserter":3r32grea said:
eBay should look into this I think.
There was a time when you could apply whatever P&P charges you liked, but eBay cottoned onto this (no sellers fees on P&P) and eBay are now pretty strict on what you can charge, with 'known' items having a preset P&P that you can't exceed e.g. my son recently helped a friend sell a PS3 and according to the 'postage calculator' on eBay it was going to cost £18 in postage alone, but eBay wouldn't allow P&P to exceed £17.

I think it should be left to market forces, the p+p is there to see before bidding, however frustrating it may be to pass on an item with high postage.

Ebay interference in p+p creates as many problems as it solves. I've had the same experience as above but selling books; a heavy three volume set can't be accurately estimated in the p+p section because of the preset limits imposed by ebay on book postage, so I have had to revert to the freight category, but this also puts potential customers off.

As far as buying goes, as long as the seller provides what he says, ie. recorded, first class etc, I just decide with an educated guess if I'm happy to bid given the postage charge quoted.
 
adidat":2t5zxwux said:
surely i should not be paying for some one's time spent packaging the item, or there want to use brand new packaging.

Why not? Free market and all that. Pay up, or don't buy from the seller. Walking away is your ultimate weapon.

BugBear
 
cambournepete":3oty6tfi said:
RogerP":3oty6tfi said:
It's not just eBay sellers that overcharge. I found many shops/dealers/stockists can be even worse - just paid £6.99 delivery for something that will only cost half of that.
I've less of an issue with that as they are a commercial organisation and you're paying for someone's time to pack it, post it and new packing materials. I still might look elsewhere though.
... but many eBay sellers are also businesses.
 
I charge for the actual postage cost and the packaging materials. Nothing more. I'm not going out of my way to find old boxes or packaging materials just so that someone saves a few pence on the overall cost. If I happen to have an old box/bubble wrap then that's an entirely different matter.
You might be surprised at the actual cost of some packaging materials. I've just had to custom order 10 large Cardboard boxes - 1 meter in length. They work out at £12 each. Add in Bubble wrap costs and you are nearer to £25. That's not counting the actual time spent packaging. These are for my actual day to day work and not Ebay sales.
 
i agree. what looks like a bog standard. off the shelf box that you look at and think would cost a few pence can be very expensive in small quantities. Larger boxes, and as Mignal describes custom sizes are scary in price.
 
It does annoy me when people are blatantly trying to make their minimum price with exorbitant PnP costs - things like "buy it now for 50p, PnP £6.50" - but then, eBay basically encourages this kind of behaviour. I think of it in similar terms to 'reserve prices', where an item gets listed with a ridiculously low starting bid but doesn't actually sell unless the bid price reaches some higher secret limit the seller pre-sets. Why not just set your minimum price to the actual minimum price you're willing to sell the item for? It's an exercise in the dishonest kind of marketing, IMO - not trying to persuade the buyer that your item is superior to the next item along and they should buy it for that reason, but trying to con them into believing it's cheaper than it really is. It's probably unfair in a lot of cases, but I tend to view such sellers with suspicion (will I get decent service from them? How will they react if I need to return the item or if it gets lost in the post?) and avoid them.

That said, when you buy something online, you're not just paying for the item, but also for the seller to ensure that the item turns up at your house. The packaging itself, the time taken to pack it, the time and possibly petrol taken to get it to a post office and the payment to the post office to ship it are all part of that PnP charge... so I'm personally fine if a seller charged me £2.50 for PnP and the postage label only has a charge of £1.80 on it.


Thankfully, eBay now has a "sort by Price+PnP" option, so you can order your search results in terms of actual total price rather than just headline price. ;-)




Harbo":2yz7pcnc said:
Also it depends on their value - Recorded Signed For only insures up to £46 and that costs £3.65 for a small item. Anything over that requires Special Delivery and a cost of £6.35.

In that case, I would estimate the P&P based on the end price I expected the item to reach, and if it sold for a higher price and I had to pay more for insured postage, I'd consider myself lucky to have sold it for the higher price and swallow the extra costs!
 
I am no expert EBay seller but I sold a couple of reasonably high items a few weeks ago. Having got some ideas of winning bids, I placed one with a starting price of about half what I expected. Very nerve wracking as bidding didn't start until 3hrs before finish but I did get what I wanted!
On some lower value items I started them at 99p with reasonable postage costs. Most did well but somebody got a 99p bargain. Where I got a very good price I sent by SD.
One winner on a £200 bid turned out to be a Russian with an Asian name and UK address - he did pay up though!

Rod
 
I've never sold anything through eBay, but have bought a few bits and pieces recently. Have to admit that I don't bother too much about p&p charges, but do add what I'm prepared to bid to the stated p&p and regard that as the price I'm paying. If that total is more than I'm prepared to pay, I don't bid. However, if it's something I need or want, I may well pay a little 'over the odds' to secure it. So far, only once do I think I've made a mistake, but the sum involved wasn't great, so just put it down to experience.

One thing I have noticed is the variable quality of packaging - some superb, some barely adequate. There is no descernable link with value of purchase - a 'bargain' chisel arrived packed so well it took it me ten minutes to liberate it from it's wrapping, but a wooden try plane arrived thrown in a thin, battered cardboard box with the iron and wedge loose and the lid held shut with two short pieces of sellotape - the Post Office did very well to get it here without losing the smaller bits.

I think it's just down to human nature - some people care, some people don't. Luck of the draw which you get.
 
If I am buying on Ebay I always factor the P&P into my bid.

If I am selling which I don't do a lot of now due to the high paypal and ebay charges, I always weigh the item, then add a bit on for packaging and then a bit for diesel as I have a 6 mile round trip to the post office.

But I have to agree that some sellers really try it on, but at the end of the day you don't have to bid.

Tom
 

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