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Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

How come I can order something fairly heavy from China for $3 with free shipping? Of course they do WAY more volume than Japan, but it still makes no sense, it costs me more than that to ship it across town, and it's literally the same guy doing the local delivery.

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It really depends on the company you were dealing with. They almost certainly have someone stateside who are dealing with customs, picking up containers and unpacking them. With enough volume, it's quite doable.

Basically, for shipping by sea, weight is barely important. Volume is the most important thing. I forget how much it costs to ship a container (like those big containers you see at ship yards or on trains), but essentially it is little enough that cross atlantic/pacific is essentially free. If you have enough to fill up a container and you have someone who can do the paperwork on the other end, it is totally feasible.

I shipped my bicycles from England to Japan on a partial palette. I can't even remember how much I paid... Maybe $100. And that's for a third party shipping company that came to my door, wrapped my bike boxes, put them on a palette and found space in an unfilled container. The hitch? I had to go to the docks in Japan, fill in the paperwork, do the customs inspection, etc. It took me a whole day. To have someone else do the work for me on that side would have cost $1000.

If you can't receive large shipments, then they have you over a barrel and they will suck the money out of you. Probably there is a business opportunity there...

I forget how much it costs to ship a container

Order of magnitude: thing "new iPhone" not "new MacBook." If that leaves anyone flabbergasted, yep, that is why containerization is one of the most important technologies in the world.

And the current price may be even more surprisingly lower because we live through a period of shipping capacity glut, see the bankruptcy of Hanjin Shipping.

They abuse an old international mail agreement. When mail is sent between 2 countries, it might go through several countries and it becomes difficult to calculate costs and manage forwarders.

Since it was assumed that anyone who receives a letter would write back (mind you this was thought up way before online shopping in the 1860s) it would average out, so basically every nation in the world agreed to forward foreign mail for free, assuming it would average out. This only works for things that are send as mail and not as packages.

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

All of the world's postal services have peering agreements, the same as for Internet traffic.

IIRC the Chinese government will subsidize exports from china.

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