admore LEDs to Whitney trunk

[mrlmd1]

Man, Jonathan, those are really Expensive! Don't you just love it when the shipping cost is twice as much as the item you are buying?
Are those light strip still working? I may have to get a bunch of those, just to have for something someday.

I once ordered a little rubber cover which was a little smaller than a nickel, that fit over the starter button on my jetski to keep water out of there, and the item cost $0.25 but they wanted to charge me $9.98 to ship in a box via UPS. I called the place I was ordering from and had quite a discussion with the customer service rep and the ordering dept. but finally convinced them to put them in a friggin' envelope and send it through the US mail. I bought 2 of them and instead of $0.42 for the stamp, they charged me $1.00, so I gave in. Better than $10.

[Water Warrior 2]

Just had to shell out $39 for $20 light bulbs. Not too impressed.
On the bright side the cheap $15 LED lights that came from Hong Kong were shipped free. There were $4.60 in stamps on the package. Go figure. :??:

[mrlmd1]

The light bars in Jon's post were starting at $0.99 and sold for $1.27!

[mole2]

Originally Posted by mrlmd1

Man, Jonathan, those are really Expensive! Don't you just love it when the shipping cost is twice as much as the item you are buying?
Are those light strip still working? I may have to get a bunch of those, just to have for something someday.

I once ordered a little rubber cover which was a little smaller than a nickel, that fit over the starter button on my jetski to keep water out of there, and the item cost $0.25 but they wanted to charge me $9.98 to ship in a box via UPS. I called the place I was ordering from and had quite a discussion with the customer service rep and the ordering dept. but finally convinced them to put them in a friggin' envelope and send it through the US mail. I bought 2 of them and instead of $0.42 for the stamp, they charged me $1.00, so I gave in. Better than $10.

Since I operate an Ebay store I'd have to tell you that the best I could do for shipping is $2.95. It is against USPS regulations to put items in First Class Mail other than paper or photos. This is due to items jamming their sorting machines. Everything else must ship via First Class Mail Parcel which is more expensive. Let me give you a breakdown of a 1 oz package. The postage (with the Ebay discount of $0.15 which is the same discount from the USPS site) is $1.64 with delivery confirmation. A #0 bubble envelope runs $0.55. Add to that the Ebay and Paypal fees (yes, they both charge their fee on shipping) which combined are 16% + $0.30. That brings the very base cost to $2.84. I make $0.11 to cover paper, tape, ink and handling (yeah, I work cheap). International shipping adds about $2.00 to the base cost for that 1 oz package. There is more to shipping than the cost of the stamp. I print the postage using the option of not displaying the cost. The reason I do that is everyone seems to think that is the only cost of shipping. When I stopped doing that five years ago a lot of headaches went away.

By the way, as a side note to those making purchases on Ebay. When you rate a vendor on shipping time it's the time from when you paid for the item until it's put in the carriers hand. It's not the time it takes to arrive. Check the Ebay rules (of which they don't educate the consumer so that the seller gets lower ratings so they can deny discounts) and you'll see it there. They tell you a 4 in DSR is a good rating and yet if a vendor is at a 4 overall they can and do shut down the store. Selling on Ebay is tough and they are loosing a lot of vendors due to their silly rules over the last four years. Most vendors refer to them as greedbay. And it's costing the consumer in higher prices. If you remember in the past if you put a search in for something you got 20 pages of the item from different vendors. Now you're lucky if you get five. I am slowly transitioning to Amazon and will open my own web site in the future in order to cut ties with Ebay (and I've been with them a long time).

[mrlmd1]

Mole, I understand your problem, but this was from a company directly handling Seadoo jetski parts and paraphenalia, not on eBay. Regardless, I understand about the USPS and restrictions on first class mail, but these 2 soft little rubber covers were as thin as a dime and would not have jammed up any sorting or stamping machine. And $10 to pack it in a small box with bubble wrap or styrofoam peanuts would border on insane, and I wasn't told of a bubble envelope or given any other choice than the UPS box. They put the two of them in a tiny plastic ziplock bag in a regular envelope and it arrived just fine via Uncle Sam 2 days later.