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Comment by vinhboy | Hacker News Reader

One thing that should be emphasized for anyone who has not use FBA before: The cost of shipping something to an amazon warehouse is REALLY cheap if you use their provided shipping service. I would say it's about 1/3 of the actual cost of shipping it yourself.

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Makes one wonder if you could ship things to other people cheaply by selling them to yourself through FBA with the other person's address as the shipping destination.

If you try this out, please share how it works out. I remember interning there I had access to very cheap shipping (~30% FedEx/UPS rates). This seems like a neat way to get access to the same benefit.

Is it legal using this method to ship to other places as mentioned above?

Mostly joking, so someone else will need to try it out. :) My guess is that if it worked well enough for people to start abusing it, they'd close the loophole. As another poster points out, you still need to pay their transaction fee, so the shipping savings has to more than offset that in order for the trick to even be worthwhile.

I'm sure you could but you would have to pay the commission to Amazon for selling it through their marketplace and accessing their corporate account rates for FedEx/UPS. When I worked for Newegg, they were a major UPS client so the rates were significantly lower since with accounts this large they had to lower their rates to win the account.

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