I personally dislike finding what looks like a great deal on ebay only to find that the seller has artificially increased the S&H charges to compensate.

You’ll see a lot of listings in the Featured Auctions section of people selling things like cigarette lighters for $0.99, but the S&H charge is like $7.00 and $5.00 for each additional lighter. I’m supposed to believe it costs $12 to ship two cigarette lighters?

I don’t mind ebay sellers tacking on a little extra to cover their time and effort, but is there really $5 extra effort in adding a second cigarette lighter to the package?

I have often times purchased small items and paid $5.00 (or more) S&H costs, only to have the item(s) show up in a small ziploc(tm) bag stuffed inside a $0.75 padded envelope with $1.00 worth of postage on the envelope.

I once purchased a pack of 100 DVD-R discs along with 50 DVD cases. It was a medium sized box (less than 2′ on a side), but not very heavy, and it took 9 days from the time I paid until it arrived and I paid $25 S&H! That’s outrageous.

If you’re an ebay seller and you use this tactic, pay heed – I’ve learned to look much closer at the S&H costs before I even consider bidding on any auctions, and if your S&H costs seem abnormally high, I will not bid.

I have sold numerous items on ebay and every single time I do I set a starting bid equal to what I expect to pay for S&H plus the absolute minimum amount I would consider selling the item for. Sure, it means that my starting bid may be higher than someone elses, but it means that if one of my auctions ends at $10 – the buyer owes me $10 – period – and that’s the way I like it.

I sold a series of comedy albums to someone who lives in the same town as me and told him that if he wanted to pick them up from where I work (which was really close to where he lived) I would knock the amount I had figured for S&H off of what he owed me, and he greatly appreciated it.