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No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

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Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#481

Post by hnick »

syedkarim wrote: post #466
codebje wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay Australian GST on AliExpress imports, but it doesn't make local outfits more viable. I buy hobby electronic components primarily, local suppliers are often one to two orders of magnitude more expensive, not just a few percent more.

One or two orders of magnitude? Isn't that ten-times or a hundred-times more expensive? What product could possibly be marked up by 100x?

You can get 8 resistors for 55c retail from Jaycar or 100 for around the same price from AliExpress. So it's in the ballpark.

CR2032 batteries are a common item with an order of magnitude markup (20c each vs multiple dollars here).

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#482

Post by hnick »

This is an issue in Australia too, and since we are usually followers and not leaders for these kinds of issues it might mean a change is on the cards for us too. Is there an easy way to find out? My hope is that the USPS leaving the Union is enough of a threat to shake up the rules for all countries.

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#483

Post by dantheman »

eropple wrote: post #378
aurizon wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The postal service has beenbadly run for decades, with excess deliveries - once a day. Make delivery once a week and chageextra for daily delivery. As e-mail sucked away letters the USPS staff all stayed employed with fat wages as well as fat pensions. Now those excess people and unfunded pensions have sucked USPS dry and allowed UPS and Fedex etc to craft specialized services to dan lots of $$ from the system. Deliv…

This aggressively selects against the elderly, the poor, and rural and even many parts of suburban living. I am not, as a rule, particularly fond of rural or suburban living due to free-rider problems, but as long as we choose to subsidize those lifestyles, a prompt and rigorous postal service is necessary. And as long as we have poor (and old) people kept out of the technological race, it is incumbent upon us to not…

If you want to give them welfare, give them welfare. It's better than subsidizing inefficient systems that distort the market.

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#484

Post by [deleted] »

Scoundreller wrote: post #425
arcticbull wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My guess is that the company just hires dual citizens to avoid visa issues. This isn't related, the company can hire anyone they want to man the trucks. Do it often, and you register with FAST. > US lets you do personal imports up to US$800 per import without taxes/duties, so they limit it to that. That only applies to personal good, not things you're bringing for commercial purposes, and there's a minimum away-fro…

Well, that’s what the transport company requires. I’m guessing they’re brokering each package themselves, not as the entire lot at once. I doubt US is letting them bring truckloads in if what I said about tariffs/taxes/duties is untrue. https://support.chitchats.com/en/articles/1733099-what-items... No minimum away-from-country time. That's for Canadians, not USians.

[deleted]

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#488

Post by elcritch »

Scoundreller wrote: post #425
arcticbull wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My guess is that the company just hires dual citizens to avoid visa issues. This isn't related, the company can hire anyone they want to man the trucks. Do it often, and you register with FAST. > US lets you do personal imports up to US$800 per import without taxes/duties, so they limit it to that. That only applies to personal good, not things you're bringing for commercial purposes, and there's a minimum away-fro…

Well, that’s what the transport company requires. I’m guessing they’re brokering each package themselves, not as the entire lot at once. I doubt US is letting them bring truckloads in if what I said about tariffs/taxes/duties is untrue. https://support.chitchats.com/en/articles/1733099-what-items... No minimum away-from-country time. That's for Canadians, not USians.

Sounds like the next thing for big VCs to fund. It used to be that going somewhere with strangers you met online was feared, then came Uber. Couch surfing? AirBnB. Next, getting packages around customs, tariffs, and expensive shipping by crowd sourcing? Bam! VC Unicorn.

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#489

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #434
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By those metrics, Bangladesh is more developed than Luxembourg. That's not what I'd call "reasonable." You have to normalize by population.

I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. You must divide by the population if wealth/development/whatever metric were uniformly distributed. But it’s a massive country with enormous diversity in statistics on all fronts. There are pockets far more developed than the average American town and even the most developed cities in other countries, and villages hundred of years “behind.” Debating whether or not to cal…

Then cite the GDP/capita of individual provinces or cities. Citing the GDP of the entire country is meaningless, though, given that it has 1.4 billion people. China is not more developed than Monaco, even though its GDP is thousands of times larger.

I haven't ever heard of the Chinese government claiming China to be a developed country - that was one of the original contentions above. I also think that by any reasonable metric, China is a developing country. There are pockets that are much more developed than others, but the country as a whole is still very far behind developed countries.

Re: No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

#490

Post by DoctorOetker »

nickserv wrote: post #385
Taniwha wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it (and even though I live in NZ I manufacture in China and ship all over the world from there) much of the airmail shipping from China is essentially founded on arbitrage of the empty space in air-mail shipping containers from Asia to the West - it's while it takes a while and sometimes your package goes out of Hong Kong, sometimes Singapore etc In essence those packets are cheap because some smart p…

Don't know about air mail, but for maritime and rail transport, there is much more going from China to the EU or US than in the other direction by volume. This means cargo carriers have to send back empty containers to China. As a result, it's cheaper to book a container, from, say, Antwerp to Shanghai than the reverse. The difference can be quite substantial, potentially hundreds of USD per container. For the other…

>Don't know about air mail, but for maritime and rail transport, there is much more going from China to the EU or US than in the other direction by volume.

Where can I verify this? Thats looking at only the direct transport? Or also indirect transport?

Consider a hypothetical container from the US/EU going to Africa (bringing products, second hand goods, "recyclables", ...), then the container could pick up raw minerals and resources going to China, now theres an empty container in China and it has to go back to US/EU?

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