I can give you some answers based on my experience as a vendor on here... Initially when I started offering the bubble mailers I didn't know what I was getting into with USPS. Because of that, I was charging $4-5 ($5 for international, or it was something like that) just to mail them out first class. Turns out, that even though the cost does vary whether it goes to a near region of the country, or the other end, it does vary, but not all that much. Internationally, it varies a bit more, and of course all of this depends on the weight, but even with a bubble mailer with a bunch of keys in it it wouldn't end up being all that much. Average price for domestic packages for me these days is right around $2, maybe a bit more. That comes with delivery confirmation and such. Internationally there is no delivery confirmation and it averages around $3 but can go as high as $4. Thats why after getting a large enough sample size to be confident in the prices I could charge without losing money but not marking it up, I lowered my prices. I've actually lowered them multiple times now, to the $3 US and $3.50 international for bubble mailers. That covers the outliers, cost of the bubble mailers, and frequent trips to the post office, but doesn't make me any profit. Thus, and I went over this a while ago in my group buys, the money I make from running group buys or selling keys comes from the product itself, like it should. That is usually taken care of by rounding price tiers to the next dollar etc. What they are doing, is marking up the shipping to make extra money on a per order basis, rather than a per item basis. It works, but it can be a bit excessive at times. I received this feedback, and adjusted because of it!
With this particular group buy, since its a bunch of novelty keys, its not going to be dollars since once we hit high quantities, the per key price is going to be really cheap, like $0.75 or something. I'll round to every dime or something, to keep the markup/margin small and reasonable. That way my time gets covered, and everyone still gets cheap novelty keys for a fraction of the cost of buying a single from a store. Those Japan keys for example... $4 is a great price for them as leftovers, reasonable to get how many you need, but you aren't exactly going to buy 100 of them. Its profitable, but not ridiculously so for the seller, because the inventory doesn't move that fast. Also if they're just buying them and selling them, they've got to order a significant amount to get a good price for them, requiring them to front a decent lump of cash. Anyways, compare that to the prices of some novelty keys, the TL.net key for example, which were going for $15-$20 before Team Liquid started selling them in their store, and it sounds fair. Group buys are a great deal when they come around though, because all of the sudden 500-1000 keys of a particular kind get dumped into the pool, and prices are kept low for them.
Also, if Melissa thinks the Fox key won't look good as a doubleshot, we may have to run it as a dyesub or put it in the imsto group buy. Just a little update there. Finals this week and then I'm done, but my first one isn't till Wednesday and its optional at that (I can bump my grade from a B+ to an A- in the class if I do well on it) so I may have some time tomorrow to get a bunch of GH stuff up and running.
Cheers,
Dave
