Not so long ago Trademe added a nifty courier pricing wizard into their listings screen. When you list an item you can use this feature to work out what it will cost to ship items by courier (it works out what options are available from different couriers and gives you a list of them). There are however two important limitations of it that are manifestly problematic for sellers:
1. The buyer can apparently choose which option applies to them even if they don’t know what they are talking about. I have had the situation where they were in a rural delivery area but chose a cheaper option that did not apply, fortunately in this case I did not have to argue with them over the correct rate.
2. Much more of an issue is if you choose to have the prices automatically listed on your auction. Without notifying you, Trademe changes the wording from “courier” to “shipping” and you can’t fix the change. This is a very big problem because most people assume “shipping” is a complete price whereas there is no means to incorporate additional packaging costs into this pricing.
When I complained to Trademe their lack of response showed they do not care if as a seller you end up out of pocket or in a dispute with your buyer because they changed the wording without your permission.
In addition to this you can easily end up as I did overlooking the fact that the so called convenient and easy courier option isn’t like that at all if you have to sit around waiting for a courier to turn up and collect the item. Trademe attempts to get around this by suggesting you can leave the item out for the courier to find themselves! LOL
The simple answer is: Trademe pushes this because they can get a cut of each sale of a courier product through their website. If you do your own shipping they don’t get anything out of it. But they don’t care if a seller ends up out of pocket because they supplied their own packaging instead of using a courier bag.
Me, I’m sticking with Parcel Post Tracked like I have always used. On the two packages I shipped this week, one cost me $3.20 more to ship on PPT than the courier rate the customer chose. The other one was cheaper to ship than quoted because I found a smaller packaging option. So overall I was able to weasel out of using a courier this time and next time I will use PPT from the outset.