Quote Originally Posted by bowspearer View Post
See, maybe it's just me, but I don't believe I should pay extra for sellers to go to the nth to pack things as best as they can. Those times when I've sold things, I've always gone out of my way to pack and pad stuff to the nth to ensure it gets to the other end with minimal damage and I've only every charged for materials I haven't been able to scrounge for to do it. So to me, the notion of having to pay extra to get a seller to essentially do their job, kind of seems absurd to me and it's the standard I hold myself to when I sell things.
2 things here - firstly, if he is the type of person that buys all packing material new for every sale, that's totally his right and also is his right to include that as part of the shipping and handling (im sure some online stores do this). Secondly, I didn't mean to sound like you should accept the $35 as part of him doing his job, what I meant was that given this has all happened yet you still got the toy undamaged, I'd live with the "lost" $35 and be happy the toy arrived safely, especially since it is valuable.


Quote Originally Posted by bowspearer View Post
If it was to Australia only, absolutely and I completely get where you're coming from here. The problem here is that if you look at the item description, it was listed as the seller posting worldwide, which would still be registered Australia Post these days - even if it's going by surface. As I understand it, Australia Post now give tracking on everything because of the amount of eBay parcels going through their system. $45 is certainly price gouging for Australia, but for somewhere like the US, it's certainly a reasonable ballpark. The dilemma in situations like this is whether what you're seeing is calculated shipping or whether it's a flat figure the seller has put out there to cover themselves; last I checked, eBay gave the option of stating either in a listing.
You're right about Auspost, tracking is standard on all parcels now.

The postage changes depending on where the prospective buyer is viewing the item. If I look the item up on ebay.com (no '.au'), and choose any other country for a shipping estimate, I get the following:

AU $65.00 United States AusPost Registered Post International Parcel

Both numbers are obviously numbers he added himself. It's no dilemma though - if it stays the same no matter what postcode you put into the calculator, its his own flat figure. Yes the $45 is gouging, but if you knew that why did you buy it? The fact remains is that they were the stated postage amounts and you chose to make the purchase. I'm just saying do some research in future to ensure you are properly satisfied with any/all postage charges, especially if the numbers seem high to begin with.


This actually reminds me of something from a couple years back - I wanted to buy a single birthday/greeting card from the webstore of Explosm.net
The postage quoted was around USD$40, to send a card in an envelope!
I queried it and asked if there was a cheaper alternaitve, and was told there was some recent changes to their shipping, and that "at this moment we don't really have another way of getting things out to you."
Now unless you use some International overnight express letter service (and they wouldn't), it does not cost $40 to send an envelope. I did not proceed with the transaction, because I knew that it would cost them much less (on my e-mail reply to them, I researched it to be $12) to post me an envelope, and could not justify the quoted shipping in any way. That logic kind of applies here.