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No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

sellercentral.amazon.com

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Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#391

Post by tverbeure »

euph0ria wrote: post #375
holoduke wrote: post #241

I ordered more than 1000 parcels from AliExpress, banggoods, gearbest and hobbyking. Never ever I had to pay import duty costs (Netherlands) and in most cases shipment was either free or a redicilous low amount. If everyone would be like me, no store would exist anymore here in Holland. Even though I am a bit of a hypocrite, I do think it's fair to make the market a bit more fair.

Just curious, what type of stuff do you buy? I find that the quality often is poor when buying from Aliexpress with artificial ratings boosted by the seller doing anything to get a high review. Banggood has been better with more accurate ratings.

Not OP, but I've used AliExpress to stock my home electronics lab with resistors, LEDs, Blue Pill microcontroller boards, connectors, etc.

All dirt cheap, often in individual parcels, shipping cost close to zero.

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#392

Post by ikeboy »

tverbeure wrote: post #389
ikeboy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they're most likely using ePacket, which is more expensive than UPU rates and is profitable for the USPS, and is not subsidized.

You're right that not all of them have tracking. The ones with full tracking are AliExpress Standard Shipping and ePacket. Not that there's a noticeable difference in shipping cost: in some ePacket cases, the shipping cost was $0, even when the product itself was a $2.50 microcontroller board.

They may not be charging you for shipping but they're definitely paying for it.

I'm not sure exactly what program AliExpress Standard Shipping is sent through. It seems like it's slower but it's hard to get information. How does the shipping label look?

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#393

Post by zizee »

Lots of speculating why it is cheaper to ship from China than domestically, a lot of it misguided.

The root cause is that quite a few years ago the consortium of national postal providers which setup agreements on who pays for which parts of international shipping decided that China was classed as a developing country and given subsidized rates by other countries. This wasn't a big deal when the agreement was made because it was before the days of pervasive online commerce, and there just wasn't that much sent from China to other countries via the postal service.

I encourage everyone interested in this to checkout this podcast episode from NPR's Planet Money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...

> The reason for this price gap, Jayme claims, is a secretive group of postal policymakers that meets every four years to fix international shipping rates. A kind of postal illuminati.

> Today's episode: A conspiracy theory that's actually real. How the decisions made behind closed doors make it cheap to buy things from across the world, but are also distorting the global economy.

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#394

Post by magduf »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #333
leshow wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that price hard to believe. Has anybody else had an experience like this?

With USPS it will depend largely on how you send it. Priority Mail will be expensive (and fairly quick). A first class package (if you're within the limits) can be much cheaper if you don't mind the lack of tracking. I mailed some 8x10s overseas in a rigid envelope and my friend swore up and down it would be too expensive ($30+). I think in the end it cost under $10 per envelope. Meanwhile international postcards fro…

>Meanwhile international postcards from Germany were like 2€.

What are you talking about? I was just in Germany last year, and sent a bunch of international postcards for €0.90 each. That's the standard postcard rate for sending a postcard anywhere in the world. (It's €0.45 within Germany.)

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#395

Post by baybal2 »

tyingq wrote: post #125
magduf wrote: post #5

This actually sounds like a good thing. It costs Chinese shippers almost nothing to send stuff directly from China, while it costs me quite a lot to send stuff within the US, largely because I'm subsidizing all the Chinese shippers. Moreover, for me to send any parcel (even very small ones, like 2 oz.) outside the US costs a small fortune these days, again because I'm subsidizing the Chinese shippers.

It also only allows it for small shipments, so it encourages the Chinese to sell directly. The per-item shipping cost wasn't close to UPU rates unless you shipped a whole container, and sometimes not even then.

Express marine freight will take 5 or 6 days, and cost close to nothing per Kg.

This is how most fresh produce gets shipped.

With paid for expedited customs clearance it may actually end up faster than ePacket.

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#396

Post by entropea »

outworlder wrote: post #376
entropea wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So is drop shipping from China now dead? Probably. This is going to drop a lot of sellers off of Amazon and eBay, and likely have major effects on independent small business dollar/99c stores.

Why would dollar stores be affected? Are they not buying stuff in bulk and shipping themselves?

Dollar General, Family Dollar, etc, won't feel it, but little independent small 99c/dollar store businesses will.

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#397

Post by ryanackley »

seemack wrote: post #379
ryanackley wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Shopify's marketplace for selling online businesses [0]. I limited the search to dropshipping. Dozen's of businesses with five figure monthly revenue and a few with more than that. Revenue data comes directly from Shopify and can't be edited by the seller. These are just the businesses for sale. I would call this more than a handful. Look, Shopify is a great product and long-term I only see it growing. That…

Not sure what's changed but that link shows me only one business with 5-figure monthly revenues.

you aren't scrolling past the featured listings...

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#398

Post by inferiorhuman »

lancesells wrote: post #390
inferiorhuman wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently returned a 13 inch laptop to Amazon from Hong Kong after they sent 2 and it was around USD120 (reimbursed by Amazon). HK Post wants about H$350 to get a 3kg parcel from HK to France. That works out to about $45. $370 did sound particularly egregious, but I just checked UPS' online quote site[1] and got a quote of $311-394 for a 5 pound, A1 sized package from California to Paris. I'm not quite sure what A1…

Around 24.5 x 33 inches. It might be the size kicking it up. I work in fairly large art sizes and prices go up really fast based on dimensions.

So ISO A1 then. I plugged in something like 24x33x5 as well as the Amazon A1 size (which is smaller) and got the same price range but with additional options for the smaller (Amazon A1) sized package. At that size, the weight is the determining factor at USPS (at least based on the rates I've seen) even though 24x33 is still considered an oversized package.

OTOH if you want to ship it express (Global Express Guaranteed — GXG in USPS speak) that comes out to around $265 (less if you pay online) and not all post offices will take GXG packages. $60 to $265 is the difference between a 1-3 business day expected delivery time and 6-10 business days.

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#399

Post by baybal2 »

Kadin wrote: post #286
hashkb wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very common to get (large) items via DHL from mainland China to SF in less than a week. The US simply doesn't manufacture the same set of items. Raising the cost to order items from China for political reasons will just hurt existing business. There's no alternative, I have a choice to pay more or not buy.

The US doesn't manufacture those items because it's cheaper to have them shipped from China. Raise the cost of manufacturing them there and importing them, and the balance changes. The domestic vs. offshore production calculus is actually closer than a lot of people realize, in many instances. Often it's a choice between a highly-automated and capital-intensive production process in the US, vs. a manual process at a…

> The US doesn't manufacture those items because it's cheaper to have them shipped from China. Raise the cost of manufacturing them there and importing them, and the balance changes.

The US doesn't manufacture those items because it has no capability to do so.

There are no factories, no supply chain, no expertise and no known how.

There are some things that are cheaper to manufacture in US, (surprise!) if you manufacture for the local market, than in China, but them being simply cheaper still doesn't mean you can actually manufacture them.

I myself tried to setup an electric scooter factory, first in Canada, and than in Washington state. We were simply unable to find even moderately competent manufacturing engineers, nor the line workforce.

Of course, every consumable and every part had to be imported.

And both of the above meant that we decided to close the business in under 6 months.

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#400

Post by baybal2 »

fhood wrote: post #325
xster wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still humans in postal sorting centers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjdpz05u2DY omg...

Basically has to be right? Even if the shipping labels were completely standardized, you still have to deal with irregular package dimensions, composition, and label locations. The sort of stuff that robots aren't so good at.

China had postal 2D barcodes for more than a decade...

Guys in the video seem to be showing the pile into sorting machines.

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