Free shipping from China | Hacker News Reader

Free shipping from China

romain.goyet.com

5 pointsEcco6 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_zone

China uses free trade zones extensively. This means that some items a moved in bulk to domestic staging areas, so not everything is leaving from China, I believe that there are requirements that they be postmarked from China due to import export rules.

Second, China's postal system is a social system of a communist state, it is heavily subsidized and therefore much of the costs are hidden in the system.

Hi, thanks for your help sorting this out! I quite don't understand your point though:

- The Free Trade Zone seems to be related to customs (which, by the way, I was never asked to pay…).

- Even if China's postal system is heavily subsidized, there's a part of the shipping that is handled by non-chinese people (once the package is in the customer's country). So who would be paying for that part?

Customarily the seller pays customs which is a percent of the price IIRC, the free trade zones allow China and other countries to ship stuff in bulk to another country and stage it as well as offset the cost of customs until the time of purchase. So it allows them to pre-ship bulk items to domestic staging areas. This may account for how the item gets to your country, but yes is does not account for domestic shipping. China may have agreements in place for domestic rates in other countries but that I do not know. I do know the Special Economic Zones account for the ability to get items from China to consumers at extremely low cost per item.

Amazon isn't losing any money on prime shipping. If you look at "other purchase options you can see that many other vendors offer the same products for about $3.99 less, but charge for shipping. Amazon's merely hiding the shipping cost with an elevated retail price.

I often hear people talk about how you're not really getting 'free' shipping since you are paying $99. Well, yes, but, that $99 doesn't just get you free shipping. Also free music streaming, quite a few free movies/tv shows, free photo storage, free music storage.

Honestly, I think $99 is a steal for all you get considering the music streaming alone costs you more than $99 a year on Google Play or Apple Music.

That's true, and it's great if you can use it. I don't care for their content delivery.

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