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Entry posted by atari2600land April 8, 2009

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I just won an eBay auction by not using the Buy It Now button. It helps a lot if nobody else was bidding. In my quest to get every single black Tengen NES cart, I got Road Runner for $2.49. The Buy It Now price was $5.19, so I got it half price by not giving in to temptation. The shipping is worth more than the item. How weird is that? Does it *really* cost $3.75 to ship one NES game, or are the sellers (there are more than one charging $4.00) just being greedy or stupid? I am also expecting Shinobi and Alien Syndrome to come in the mail this week. The only one left to buy now is Fantasy Zone, which, perusing eBay, i think I'll have to pay way more than $2.49 for.

Also, I beat the DS CPU in Scrabble 430-184. The Q was the last letter left and I got it. Luckily, I was able to place it on a triple letter score, creating the word "QI" for 31 points. I have come to the conclusion that the AI on this thing is actually AS (artificial stupidity), as I had it set on level 4 out of 5 difficulty. The thing makes either the word "OE" or "OI" half the time. There are plenty of words that have both those letters in the middle of them. I was surprised when it actually used a triple word score spot i left open with an X, but other than that, it's pretty dumb.

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EricBall 241

Posted April 8, 2009

If you ignore the "$100 shipping for the $1 item" scam artists, I think shippers fall into three main categories:

1. actual cost - typically these are low volume sellers so they have the time to figure out the shipping cost for each item. If they're smart, they will include the cost of any packing materials.

2. flat rate - they guys either ship lots of the same item or enough of similar items that they can determine what their overall actual cost is and then divide it by the number of items shipped. This is also the price the herd uses.

3. courier pricing - UPS, FedEx & the other couriers have online calculators. Plug in the size & weight of the item along with the to & from and the calculator gives the price. Or use one of the prepaid boxes. This is often used by high volume sellers who don't have the time to figure out the actual cost.