Jeremy Harris said:
Their prices are pretty good, too, but their shipping charges seem just crazy. Quite how they can charge around double the cost that other vendors do for shipping is beyond me.
THey have learned from watching ebay: many many people on ebay charge very little for an item, but exorbitantly for shipping, and they make a killing on their stuff because of it, since people do not seem to often consider shipping costs until after they have ordered an item. (I hear complaints about that all the time in discussions with people about various online stores).
My older sister once wanted a violin to try getting back into it (she used to play as a child) so we found some on ebay very cheap ones for $40, and knowing they would probably be junk and hardly hold a tuning, thought perhaps to order one, then noticed the shipping was well over $200, plus extra $150 "handling" fees, and other fees only listed in the text of the items and not in any of the ebay-fields on the listing. Would come in at several hundred dollars, for a piece of junk, when a used one at a pawn shop locally would cost the same or less and be a known, testable, and probably good item. The same listing type was used for many musical instruments by many ebay sellers at the time, around late 2005 or so, and one would see sellers vanish as ebay terminated them for complaints and another would just spring right up, usually with the same name but an incremental number after the name.
Then I started seeing a lot of one-dollar items (actual value usually many times to many hundreds of times that), where shipping would be anything from nearly reasonable to (more often) absolutely insane, like several hundred dollars to ship a camera memory card.
Pretty obvious what they're doing, yet equally obvious that it must be working or so many people would not have followed the "business model".
I'm sure that things are no different now, though I no longer search ebay for much of anything even for friends that can afford it, as it is too full of cheaters liars and buyers are not really protected all that well even if you use paypal, unless you tie your bankcard to paypal so you can use the bank to help you out. Things are probably actually worse with the shipping bit.