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Comment by true_maybe | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a tangent, but Etsy lost me (and likely some amount of other sellers) when they pushed so hard on free shipping. Not all products are amenable to this, and we wound up losing money on every shipped item under the new plans. Ebay also did this at some point in the past, with the same results.

Those two, and this example has me wondering why these companies continue to side with the buyers?

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>side with the buyers?

Isn't it obvious though? The buyers are the ones transferring their money from their account into the coffers of Etsy. If they piss off one seller, 2 more will pop up in its place.

Consumers just work that way. I've had an ebay account since 2006 and I can't count the times I've posted something for 15$ + variable (3-8$) shipping that wouldn't sell that I just sold for 22$ with free shipping instead and it goes.

Funny thing, I totally filter by free shipping too when I buy on ebay. It's just easier.

To anyone reading the above and thinking "well, just move the shipping cost over to your product cost, duh" -- the problem is that shipping becomes dramatically more expensive the further the package is going. How do you pick one single price for an item when 50% of your customers are in the US and 50% are in the UK? Which half subsidizes the other?

You can list the same product for different audiences.

But there's another sharp corner to avoid: online product ad services (Google Ads, Facebook ads etc), tend to penalize merchants who list different prices depending on where the customer is located[1]:

> Don’t change the price of your product on your landing page based on a user’s location. Ensure that users can purchase the product online for the price that you submit, regardless of their location.

Which means that (if you don't want your Google ads account deactivated) you can't bake in a variable shipping cost into the product cost; you can only select one amortized shipping cost.

So sellers who want to offer free shipping are really between a rock and a hard place a lot of the time in terms of not losing money on shipping vs not overcharging buyers.

[1] https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324371?hl=en&re...

Sorry for the late reply, but Ebay.com and ebay.co.uk are considered different landing sites

Yes, that's true. That can help with international rate discrepancies for ecommerce sites that have those different TLD's. But I know for a fact that there are large ecommerce sites out there that are not doing per-TLD ad syndication, as they probably should.

Also, shipping rates within a single country can still vary pretty dramatically based on distance traveled, whether you're shipping to a remote area postal code, etc.

The problem with ebay is the scams where shipping is $50+ for something that isn't large or heavy. I always just sort by lowest price+shipping to push these off page.

> Those two, and this example has me wondering why these companies continue to side with the buyers?

Because the customer sets the demands. If the demands aren't met - customer doesn't give you the money.

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