The eBay Shopping Experience: buy a few pairs of socks, pay gargantuan postage

[mandy]

A shopper describes the eBay shopping experience: shipping gougers abound.  $62.50 shipping for 15 pairs of socks.

Online Shopping Can Weave Web of High Prices

Here's a cautionary tale about buying things on eBay. Many scare stories revolve around fears of credit card numbers being stolen. But that's not the case for me today and, I hope, it never will be. Actually, I'm not an eBay fanatic, but I've bought a handful of things at bargain-basement bids after something I needed was way out of my price range from other sources. I nearly learned a hard lesson when eBay notified me that somebody outbid my $2 maximum for something worth about 10 bucks...

So I ordered all 15 pairs, totaling $4.95, and clicked to the next page to get the total, including postage. Imagine my surprise -- no, my horror, because I almost automatically clicked "commit to buy," based on the assumption that postage would be a couple of bucks, tops.

My finger was mere millimeters from the key when the postage figure leaped out at me: $62.50 for priority mail. That's right: sixty-two dollars and fifty cents, for a $4.95 order of 15 pairs of socks...

full article: http://ecommercetimes.com/story/difulDi1...ices.xhtml