Why stick to strictly under $78? Something that costs $2 with free shipping has a built in $0.78 discount if you consider its free postcard function.
Postal Arbitrage
61–70 of 293 posts
Re: Postal Arbitrage
#62Has this person tried it?
Doesn't Amazon shipping have to go to the billing address on the credit card?
Being able to purchase on a credit card and have it sent anywhere makes it that much easier to use stolen credit cards.
Re: Postal Arbitrage
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
The distance the boat has to cover is 11800 kilometers, and the truck covers only 54 kilometers. Taking that average of 12 times more usage from the table of sibling comment means the ship is still 20x worse.
But what if you apportion the fuel usage over the items transported? Presumably the ship carries far more items than the truck.
This is already taken into account: Shagie's table is based on [1], which is per kilogram-kilometer
[1] https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/freight-transportation
Re: Postal Arbitrage
#64In Poland, OLX (basically equivalent eBay) commonly has promotional campaigns, where you can buy something from a select category with 1 PLN shipping to box machine (around $0.30).
So people figured out, that you can abuse it to send anything to anyone in the country. Just create a fake listing for 1 PLN, let the receiver "buy" it (there is some extra service fee, but like $1) and there you go - probably the cheapest shipping possible, much cheaper than regular ~$5-7 box machine package.
Re: Postal Arbitrage
#65Last time I checked (a few years ago), it was cheaper to send letters and small packages from South Korea to Germany than from Germany to Germany. The delay was also not that big (maybe 1-2 weeks instead of 3-5 days). I already envisioned an arbitrage business for this: a simple page where people upload their non-urgent letters as PDFs, and I just print and mail them from Korea.
Re: Postal Arbitrage
#66I've used something like this list to get "over the hump" for $35 to reach free shipping without prime. It's horribly annoying to have a product that is $34.99 and you want it, but it'll cost shipping unless you get the damn Volkswagen screw; and then Amazon ships them individually anyway.
Just play their stupid game. My wife does this all the time, buys random items just to go past the free shipping range, then the item goes into trash (or is returned, if possible).
Even sellers started doing this, but instead of selling random items, they sell "extra hardened packaging material" conveniently at $1, $2, $3... prices. Of course when item arrives, no extra material to be seen. When questioned, one of them said "well, the package had cardboard box - that's it, wink wink, please do not report us".
Re: Postal Arbitrage
#67Don't give money to amazon that is better spent on an amazingly efficient postal service. Amazon is subsidized by imaginary money until they put all their competition out of business(including USPS).
I hate USPS, and will not be doing anything to benefit them until they offer a way to limit my deliveries to once a month, and opt out of anything that has "or current resident" At the very least they should charge more for bulk mail, not give out discounts.
Unfortunately bulk mail is the only thing paying the bills. That and being a last mile delivery service for Amazon.
Re: Postal Arbitrage
#68Turns out, at least in my area, for the grocery items you need to buy at least $25 worth to qualify for the free shipping.
I checked the first five items while logged in with Amazon Prime. They all required a minimum order of either $25 or $100 to get free shipping.
Re: Postal Arbitrage
#69This story comes to my mind. A pizzeria owner made money buying his own $24 pizzas from DoorDash for $16 https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-p...
Note: the Verge article links to this blog post, describing the situation in more detail: https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
Thank you, this was a fun rabbit hole to dive down. That blog also has a well-argued article about Zero Interest Rate Policy which relates to the doordash story: https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world
Re: Postal Arbitrage
#70I'm super surprised there is still free shipping for small things. In (some) other parts of the world, they will charge significant delivery fürs for anything below $50 or so. It basically changed during Covid, and since every shop is now doing it, there's no competition on that.