I charge exact cost for shipping and end up eating some of the cost because the platform takes a chunk of that as part of the overall 11 point something % transaction fee.
Well this would most likely be due to the fact that large businesses get huge discounts on shipping. There's a lot of politics when it comes to shipping. Honestly it makes me furious. It would cost me, a person living in the U.S., more money to send a postcard to my nextdoor neighbor than it would cost a Chinese based business to send my neighbor a television in the mail. U. S. based companies get huge discounts on shipping too. This really hurts the small business owner or the person selling online to make a little bit of extra income. We struggle to compete. I noticed that people HATE paying postage for something they are buying. So, If we offer free postage like a high volume business... we will have to raise the price of the item in order to be able to afford to ship it to you. Now our price will seem too steep, but it will have to be or we will end up spending money to sell instead of making money....or even to break even... Think about it we spend for the books. We pay shipping too some times if we have an online source for inventory. Then we have a listing charge, and once sold a percentage taken from our sales from the web site it was sold on. Then if we use PayPal we will be charged for that too. Ebay sux for the small volume seller. They charge more to a small volume seller than they do to a large volume seller... And china ...I am not even sure if china has to pay anything at all. They bring traffic to their site. Oh yeah and those Gemini boxes ....well they aren't cheap. To top it off ...postage just went up...(thanks a lot Joe)...
And this is why you must take out a second on your home to get a Comic book in the mail from a person like me.
And it's almost worth it to by bulk random boxes and cross your fingers. I sometimes buy the boxes that load it up with the publisher I want or else I will end up getting 80% fillers that I couldn't give away.
The least expensive (and by the book) shipping for 1 comic first class is about $5. Shipping media mail is against the rules with comics (not to mention the up to 3 weeks ship time and damage). If you cant afford to spend the $5 on shipping you probably shouldnt be spending your money on comics in the first place,
To build on Steve's point, not only is it against the rules to use USPS Media Mail for comics, if you read the fine print, you'll see that putting a media mail label on your package is considered consent for a postal worker to open the package and inspect the item. To qualify for media mail an item can only have one interior advertisement, The postal worker has the right to flip through the comic book so that they can count the ads. When they find too many, they upcharge the package to priority and if you dont have a shipping account for them to bill, they'll bill the recipient. Leaving them a bill and a likely damaged comic. It doesn't happen often, there's too many packages and too few inspectors, but it does happen.
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Oh yeah and those Gemini boxes ....well they aren't cheap. To top it off ...postage just went up...(thanks a lot Joe)...
And this is why you must take out a second on your home to get a Comic book in the mail from a person like me.
https://about.usps.com/notices/not121/not121_tech.htm