A free shipping mystery • Hacker News Board

Re: A free shipping mystery

#161

Post by Animats » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 8:36 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #103

SilasX wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't the postal treaties be something more sane like: "Find the amount charged to domestic senders to go from the incoming drop-off point to the destination. Got it? Okay, if the foreign post drops it there, they get charged that amount." Then, everyone gets charged the same, and you can't overcharge foreigners without also screwing your own people. Plus, foreigners get cheaper postage as they drop it closer to…

Because if I want to ship a birthday gift to my uncle in Indonesia, and I show up at the post office wanting to do that -- how are the people at the post office supposed to figure out how to much to charge me, where the 'incoming drop-off point' in Indonesia is, and how much it would cost at that moment in time to ship from the 'incoming drop-off point' to my uncle in Indonesia? For every possible location on the pla…

The Universal Postal Union was classically focused on international letter mail, back when that mattered. Until 1969, there were no terminal delivery charges, much like the early days of the Internet when there were no peering charges. Each country had to deliver within its own country for free. But because letter traffic tended to be roughly equal in both directions, this wasn't a problem.

When terminal delivery charges came in, countries were divided into classes based on economic criteria, basically gross national income per capita. Surface area of the country is also figured in.[2] Because there hasn't been a recalc of this in a few years, China gets a very good rate. This may change in 2016.

[1] http://www.upu.int/uploads/tx_sbdownloader/reportStrategyCon... [2] http://www.upu.int/uploads/tx_sbdownloader/resolutionClassif...

Re: A free shipping mystery

#162

Post by smarx007 » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 8:52 AM UTC

RealGeek wrote: post #138

rahimnathwani wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this before, but not seen any primary sources. Can you point to any?

Just searched and found this http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/united-nations-subsidy-chinese...

This is the reason why I love HN - again, a comment that shines more light on a question than the original post itself.

Re: A free shipping mystery

#163

Post by cconcepts » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 8:56 AM UTC

tempestn wrote: post #160

nebula1 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aliexpress won't loss money, but vendors do.

Then why would they sell the 3-cent buttons?

So that people who need a 3-cent button use the service, are impressed by it and become higher margin customers later on.

Re: A free shipping mystery

#164

Post by Freak_NL » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 8:57 AM UTC

tempestn wrote: post #160

nebula1 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aliexpress won't loss money, but vendors do.

Then why would they sell the 3-cent buttons?

Most vendors on AliExpress only sell such low-cost items in lots, so you could, for example, only buy these buttons by the dozen. Although that still means you end up with a margin that is ridiculously instead of ludicrously small.

Re: A free shipping mystery

#165

Post by bkor » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 9:02 AM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #141

foobarian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides, 10 days by sea?

10 days is a bit short indeed, but... Modern container ships travel at about 25 knots (unless they're doing fuel-saving slow cruise at 12 knots). http://www.sea-distances.org/ tells me that a 25-knot ship going from Hong Kong to Marseilles via the Suez Canal takes 13 days 7 hours to get there. In practice, of course, there's loading and unloading on both ends (figure 2 days) and you're not traveling through the Suez…

I urge you to just lookup the schedules using something like http://www.shipmentlink.com/ or http://www.linescape.com/. For one, 25 knots is a ridiculously high speed. At the same time, 12 knots is way too low. Any shipping line will sail a bit quicker on the main haul (=direction where most full containers go to). So China->Europe is usually quicker than the other way around.

But the huge mistake you're making is that a container vessel will make additional stops and it does not connect every possible port to every other possible port. If you have uncommon combinations, the container will usually be moved from one vessel to another. This adds additional time (days).

Hong Kong -> Fos Sur Mer is like 31+ days.

Re: A free shipping mystery

#166

Post by Freak_NL » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 9:05 AM UTC

the-dude wrote: post #11

Animats wrote: post #10

It's a combination of subsidies in China [2] and really low Universal Postal Union rates for terminal delivery from China to the US.[1] Terminal delivery in the US is about $1/Kg. Market rate from Shentzen to Long Beach to ship a container is about $1200 right now. [1] http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/united-nations-subsidy-chinese... [2] http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp396.pdf

In the Netherlands our postal service has already stopped delivering packages from China to your door ( very recently ). They just slip in a statement 'pick up here & here'. I guess they thought it was too much work too.

That sounds more like an exception than the rule. Everything I order from AliExpress of DHGate ends up at my door. We do have a very dedicated PostNL delivery guy here though.

Re: A free shipping mystery

#167

Post by tempestn » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 9:08 AM UTC

cconcepts wrote: post #163

tempestn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why would they sell the 3-cent buttons?

So that people who need a 3-cent button use the service, are impressed by it and become higher margin customers later on.

Is there really any vendor loyalty on a site like AliExpress though? It just doesn't seem that likely to pay off. On the other hand, I assume the amount the vendor is losing on a transaction like this is also minuscule, so maybe it would.

Re: A free shipping mystery

#168

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 9:16 AM UTC

I think companies like AliExpress and such use the free shipping as bait; what they really aim for (I think) is having people thinking "Hey, I could resell this button for 25 cents!" and order a million of them. Then you get the bulk sales which is what the chinese webshops can make a profit off of.

Re: A free shipping mystery

#169

Post by azevedomarti » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 9:28 AM UTC

I just had a lesson about e-commerce in the last semester. My professor said it would be much better if the price includes the shipping fee (if the fee has no big variation) since customers hate calculating the total price by themselves. They would also feel paying less if they do not see the extra cost.

Re: A free shipping mystery

#170

Post by shoo » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 9:53 AM UTC

jeena wrote: post #135

The Story of Stuff: Externalized Costs and the $4.99 Radio http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-leonard/the-story-of-stu...

> Who paid for that $4.99 radio? Some people paid with the loss of their natural resources. Some paid with the loss of clean air, with increased asthma and cancer rates. Some workers paid by having to cover their own health insurance. Kids in Africa paid with their future: a third of the school-age children in parts of the Congo now drop out to mine metals for electronics.

the Stafford Beer quote "the purpose of a system is what it does" springs to mind.

what's the purpose of our economic system? to extract physical wealth from the environment and distribute it selfishly and unequally.

can we imagine other ways of running things? yep. one old idea is a centrally-planned globally optimized economy. e.g. model the USSRs economy as one giant optimisation problem, solve for the things you need to get people to do, then encourage them to do it one way or another. perhaps a more modern spin on things is china's "citizen score" system. if that was deployed and working tolerably, you might not need currency any more. citizen points might do fine. it'd sure have other very unpleasant problems, but it might be an improvement over the capitalist system in some respects.

are the alternative systems reachable from the current system? that's more of a challenge!