Renegade
Awaiting Exile
- Joined
- 3/5/09
- Messages
- 994
- Reaction score
- 1
Why are postal charges from the USA so damn expensive ? Been following the stir-plate bulk buy, and the ludicrous shipping fees (clarification - still a pretty good deal for those who can't build their own from PC scraps & old cellphone chargers) it has got me thinking about some of my purchases from O/S.
Have recently been buying some CD's from a small label in the UK (making good on the pirated torrents I have enjoyed), and the postage costs for a disc are about three dollars. It jumped up to a mere five dollars recently when I ordered a CD & a DVD. Very reasonable, and still cheaper than sourcing this rare music locally.
I often buy stuff from Hong Kong & China from E-bay (, and while the quoted price is exorbitant, the product itself is underpriced - so they are making 'profit' from the P & P (the postmark, plus a conversion calculation shows this) but all is good. The landed product, all-inclusive, is still very good. As with the OK, international shipping is reasonable.
A t-shirt from Israel cost me a couple of dollars to get to Australia. Again, pretty good.
Let's look at America..... US vendors aren't miscalculating the shipping prices, and I don't question the vendor-quoted price, having bought various stuff from there (guitar pickups, software, books & more). One example is a website that offers 'Six-Dollar-Tshirts'. Speaking in USD terms, a single shirt will cost around as much in shipping as the unit price. You order one, you pay $12. You order two, you pay $24. I tried a combination of units up to 10, and in all cases it was roughly incremented the same.
So I ask the question again.... Why are postal charges from the USA so damn expensive ? WIthout investigating the nuts & bolts of the postal system, i believe it's a privatised affair, therefore in the hands of a profit-driven company (as opposed to Australia Post, or lets say the UK's Royal Mail) that serves to maximise shareholder confidence - or in layman's terms, rip the shit out of people who use it. Are there any American members here who can give us an insight on the price of domestic shipping for small parcels ? Here in Oz, for example, you can move up to three kilograms for a fair price across the country.
I will only buy from the USA when there's an item unsourcable from elsewhere. The cost of shipping makes it unfair to the honest vendors who could well expand their businesses internationally, but are often denied an international client-base because of the exorbitant charges to move their product across the world.
Have recently been buying some CD's from a small label in the UK (making good on the pirated torrents I have enjoyed), and the postage costs for a disc are about three dollars. It jumped up to a mere five dollars recently when I ordered a CD & a DVD. Very reasonable, and still cheaper than sourcing this rare music locally.
I often buy stuff from Hong Kong & China from E-bay (, and while the quoted price is exorbitant, the product itself is underpriced - so they are making 'profit' from the P & P (the postmark, plus a conversion calculation shows this) but all is good. The landed product, all-inclusive, is still very good. As with the OK, international shipping is reasonable.
A t-shirt from Israel cost me a couple of dollars to get to Australia. Again, pretty good.
Let's look at America..... US vendors aren't miscalculating the shipping prices, and I don't question the vendor-quoted price, having bought various stuff from there (guitar pickups, software, books & more). One example is a website that offers 'Six-Dollar-Tshirts'. Speaking in USD terms, a single shirt will cost around as much in shipping as the unit price. You order one, you pay $12. You order two, you pay $24. I tried a combination of units up to 10, and in all cases it was roughly incremented the same.
So I ask the question again.... Why are postal charges from the USA so damn expensive ? WIthout investigating the nuts & bolts of the postal system, i believe it's a privatised affair, therefore in the hands of a profit-driven company (as opposed to Australia Post, or lets say the UK's Royal Mail) that serves to maximise shareholder confidence - or in layman's terms, rip the shit out of people who use it. Are there any American members here who can give us an insight on the price of domestic shipping for small parcels ? Here in Oz, for example, you can move up to three kilograms for a fair price across the country.
I will only buy from the USA when there's an item unsourcable from elsewhere. The cost of shipping makes it unfair to the honest vendors who could well expand their businesses internationally, but are often denied an international client-base because of the exorbitant charges to move their product across the world.