eBay:
Item $5
Shipping $25
Some places don’t charge tax on the shipping so you’re paying less if you don’t choose free shipping.
That’s assuming meme math.
Practically speaking, I can buy from Amazon for the same or less than a storefront. So if you’re charging me $30 at Target and $25+$5 at Amazon, its still no loss to order off my phone rather than fight the crowd at a Big Box.
That’s before the time savings of never having to leave my house to shop. For some reason, Lemmyites understand working from home as a cost savings but stumble on shopping from home.
When you get a refund it doesn’t include shipping. So yep.
Yep it’s the return shipping that gets you. I order from REI but the closest store is 2 hours so I go 1-2x a year. Often my orders have free shipping but return shipping is prohibitively expensive. This keeps me from buying some things from their online store, either waiting to go in person or ordering it somewhere else. Or most likely, paying a bit more to get something similar locally.
one of our customers at work has two online shops: one with everything free shipping but higher prices and one with lower prices and shipping extra. both go well. i can’t say their names tho, because he’s afraid people would be angry if they find out it’s basically the same offers in both shops 😄
Guess it better to get the expensive one if not sure whether you will return as then you’ll get shipping refunded as it was factored into the price.
australia: $30 product, free shipping to north america, $20 shipping to australia… guess i’m subsidising y’all’s shipping while also getting fucked aye?!
Or $30 product, and “sorry we don’t ship to your location”
Or the fairly regular $30 product with $75 shipping.
De Minimus got dropped last Friday in the US. This means that goods valued at less than $800US can no longer be shipped duty free. And the rules of how to go about who assesses and collects the import taxes is not clear. So many postal services around the world are now refusing to ship to the US.
And Australia is one. So you are now down to fucking yourself…
shipping TO the US though… when shipping from a lot of places in the US that say free shipping for north america and incorporating that into their product cost, we subsidise your shipping and our own exorbitant rate
but i was already doing that
Tried to buy a shirt the other day. I realized it was an Australian company when I got to checkout and shipping had $23 USD stacked on the total price to cover for duties. So it was like a $34 shirt, with $75 for shipping + duties. Oof. Did not buy.
yeah its pretty standard for australia: +50% of the cost of the item in shipping
But I’ve been assured the dirty foreigners would have to pay all the republican’s tariffs?
As an Australian, I was trying to buy a record (only available from the US, from a small independent artist). The record was about $60AUD, very reasonable. The shipping was $70AUD. I didn’t buy it.
Or another small artist manufactured a super cool colour splitting lamp. Lamp was about $140, quite reasonable. Shipping was about $110. I didn’t buy it.
Supporting any small american artist is just not justifiable.
Ordering on aliexpress:
$5 item, free shipping but it crosses the ocean on the back of the next available sea turtle, and if you have any issues they’ll send you a replacement component and a loose guide on how to desolder the old component and solder the new component.
But it was worth a try
Ali is very good for stuff that you can’t really mess up and still get good reviews from unknowing people. Like stickers, cases and such.
What are you? Some kind of communist?!
On sites where people tend to sort by low price, keep shipping separate.
On sites where people buy based on emotion, give free shipping to improve conversion rates and close the deal.
people buy based on emotion
Not me. I ask the AI to do all my shopping, because it is perfectly logical and always performs the optimal action.
Oh, hey, incidentally I now have an order of 265 dozen eggs on my front porch.
How in Lemmy hell you managed to make an “AI = Bad” post in this thread is beyond me.
Spoken like a man who doesn’t eat enough eggs
Or don’t hack peoples brains and just say hey here is product, you want it? Click here.
It’s a rat race. If you don’t, someone will and you lose.
Lose what?
Edit: I ask that because I work for a company (very small) as a software engineer and we would never treat our clients like this. We are fair and quite for work, if the client changes what they want halfway then guess what, we are fair and just do the work.
Never lost a client and don’t need to advertise for new business because shocking as it seems doing good work actually gets you more work.
I don’t know if an software engineering company’s relationship to clients is very fitting to this example of non-commercial end-user consumerism of physical products. I mean, I agree with you, but I don’t get the feeling your company does many physically shipped sales and your company probably mostly works other small companies.
I don’t know. We are still selling a product, which is the service we provide.
For what it’s worth, we have clients of all sizes from family run to local transport authorities to one of the largest mobile network providers in Europe.
Just not everybody is out here trying to maximise their profits at every turn. Some people, myself included, are just happy to have enough in life and do good work.
Makes a difference when asking for a refund. No one refunds delivery charges.
We have to buy school uniforms online. This one place shipped two pairs of pants, $20 each, same size, but one didn’t pair fit. Cost us $10 to return them. Return pricing on clothes is bullshit
Actually, in Germany shops have to also refund shipping cost. There may be exceptions for large or heavy goods that require delivery by freight forwarding companies, but general parcel delivery via DHL or similar services definetly have to be refunded.
Wzf, it’s true. Brudi, I thought I was on top of my rights as a consumer.
Thinking about it, I think I’ve only ever returned partial shipments - which seems to be one of the cases where the law isn’t clear.
Super nice to know in any case!
What shops are you referring to? Nothing I ever ordered refunded my delivery fee upon return. This includes but is not limited to Amazon, Ikea, Zalando, Otto, Roller, Kaufland, Lidl, Yarn Shops, DM, Mediamarkt.
Maybe you’re thinking of the shipping cost to return the product? That isn’t covered.
Also the sellers are only obligated to return the cost of the cheapest delivery option they provided.
No, that’s not it. Often there is free shipping to begin with; sometimes there isn’t.
Sometimes the shipping costs to return the product are covered, sometimes they aren’t; but when they are covered, that still doesn’t reimburse the original shipping costs if it wasn’t free shipping [to me].
I bought patches via amazon a couple of weeks ago - from a German company - with shipping costs since they weren’t part of prime. I had to send everything back and pay for the return too, was absolutely a loss on my end but the quality was too shit to keep them. None of the shipping, neither to me nor back, was refunded.
When I buy directly from companies, be it DMC, Rosie Wool (RIP), Otto - when I pay for the shipping to me I have not been refunded the cost.
All shops I ever had something to return to with refunding instead of replacements. I always had the full price refunded without hassle including shipping costs. But iirc in those cases I returned the purchase completely.
Buying on Ali Express:
- Buy for $2
- Click on item
- $75 shipping cost
- No way to sort by total cost
No way to sort by total cost
But you can filter by free shipping.
Anyway, yeah, what an irrational decision the OP discovered.
This has not been my experience at all, delivery is almost always free for purchases over something like $20.
You can forget entirely about returns though, zero chance to get one of those to work
We must be shopping for different kinds of things, though I have exaggerated the shipping costs, I find it hard to work out what the cheapest item is. I have also commonly found what someone else mentioned, that they have different items for each “colour”, and have something cheap on one colour and the thing you actually want for a lot more on another colour. You search for the thing you want, and it comes up in the search showing the price for the thing you don’t want because the system things they are different colours of the same thing when it’s not.
The color-thing is a bit of a gotcha, yeah.
only had to do one return on ali, they gave me my money back and told me to do what I like with the non fitting phone case, off to the second hand store
There’s not even anything-close to a 100% chance you will even get your items.
If you don’t get your stuff, AliExpress will return your money, in my experience
I have ordered many things from Ali express, and sometimes the sellers cancel the order because they can’t fulfill it but I’ve never been charged for something that didn’t arrive. I’ve also never bought something expensive enough that it would be a problem if it doesn’t arrive, as I know it’s just a marketplace where I’m sure scammers exist.
I’ve never had a single issue with returns on Aliexpress
Where I live you have to foot the bill to return the item to China yourself, which is going to be a good $40-$50 and take a long time. Basically never worth the money and effort
I’ve never bothered since I rarely buy expensive stuff there. It’s not worth the bother.
Buying on Ali Express/Temu/Ebay
-
Item I want is listed for $20
-
Click item
-
It’s actually a 15cm USB-C cable for $20, the actual item which is ‘color B’ is $75
In brazil: 400 reais item clicks it Actually 700 with taxes.
Time to build an alternative Aliexpress client that shows all that right in the search overview.
-
I’ve found the Lowe’s site/app is even worse, you can sort by cost but it will “categorize” them so it shows the more expensive items first then lists the next set in cost order. I would rather just not have the option.
That sounds terrible 😐
Imagine, some website developer got asked to spend hours designing a complicated sort that made for a worse experience than a basic search.
Product $5 shipping $20…
I’m not buying.
Also, 20$ meal, 5$ tip VS 25$ meal, 0$ tip
Kind of different since the tip is going directly to the worker.
It isn’t though, because they still have to tip out the dishwashers, cooks, busboys etc. At that point it’s part of all those people’s wages and the price is just a deceptive lie.
I guess I was thinking delivery since the OP was about shipping. With delivery apps, the full tip goes to the driver so I always tip well.
If only we could know that it’s $5 tip before ordering.
Or free shipping at xx Euros, which results in me paying/buying a lot more unnecessary stuff…
This is me with car parts. Spend 2 more euros to save 3 in shipping? Welp, I guess I’m getting drained plug washers for my next 4 oil changes…
Get a fumoto valve. Never buy drain plug washer again.
Yeah but then I’m buying Fumoto valves every 2-3 years lol
? They last the life of the engine ?
Meh, washers rarely need replacing anyway.
Grew up in a shop, did tons of oil changes, driven half a dozen cars over a million miles, replaced one or two drain plugs, but never just a washer.
I mean I either get them both in a kit or just a washer, but after multiple peaks, I’ve learned it’s best to at least replace the washer because probably none of the last 10 owners did.
Current car’s plug is a 21 or 24 millimeter thread, pretty hard to screw up the plug lol
Amazon comes to mind
This is fine by me as it makes comparing prices cheaper when I’m trying to avoid Amazon. I remember once recently I tried to avoid Amazon and found some website where it was a couple of quid cheaper so I went with it. First I had to create an account, then I had to let them save my payment details, then they added tax to the item, then they added delivery, then they added tax on the delivery, then I remember some other arbitrary admin fee or something, and at the end it was nearly twice the price. So I told them to delete my account and I went with Amazon.
I frequently have the impression that kind of behavior is just a front for harvesting data.
$30 and a $5 discount when picking up at the shop
Depends on how many I’m buying and if shipping is cheaper for multiple items.
25+25+5 is cheaper than 30+30+0.
