And shipments from Asia. I recently found something for sale in Australia: $15 plus $10 shipping within Australia. I bought the exact same product direct from China/HK and it was under $4 including international shipping.
I imagine the labour cost is one contributor within Australia. Without volume, no one wants to be doing runs to the post office for a dollar.
With products from the US, I've routinely bought things from Amazon and shipped US-AU and saved money easily - hard drives, memory cards, and even things for which the shipping should make it cost prohibitive like a full-size baby pram.
It's the same in Europe. Local online merchants have no way to compete since just the national delivery costs multiple times the net price of a foreign import product.
It's good for consumers, but also means the domestic e-commerce is severely underdeveloped.
Not quite, some goods have very high tariffs and added import taxes and are checked upon heavily like (where I live) bicycles, anything containing a flat screen and non-consumer electronics (parts).
If you get caught (and you will at one time) you pay the VAT, import taxes and sometimes a fine for not reporting which amounts to more than what you would have payed locally.
It is by no means a fix but the government is not always making it as easy as you would like to skip on duties added to level the playing field.
Postage aside, which is skewed by treaties, the main purpose of import tariffs is to offset labor costs which they do pretty well in my opinion.
I do have to say that in my experience buying from both China and local (Europe) the European product are always of higher quality if you buy cheap, even if the country of origin was China in the first place. Since that is not always needed, you buy China, otherwise local.
I got curious, and indeed looks like a package in Germany is domestically 4€ and within EU 8.89€. However, when sending a small package from Finland it's 22€ domestic and 40€ to Germany with DHL.
So a disclaimer to my original claim: applies only to a subset of European countries.
Yes, I habe worked at a company where we would ship a high amount of construction machine spare parts with FedEx, DHL et al. We had a ~90% discount on their regular prices.
Actually, that’s what you get via the website. In-Store, they’ll be able to offer you a reduced rate costing half of what they offer online. I had assumed the same, and was expecting to pay ~9€, but the employee in the DHL store recommended me the cheaper solution.
And so I shipped a bunch of HDDs from Germany to the Netherlands in 3 days for 3.40€
And if you’re a company, you get a ~90% discount even. The cost isn’t in shipping, but in the employees in the store picking up your package. Pre-Sorted packages delivered directly to a hub are really cheap.
I imagine the labour cost is one contributor within Australia. Without volume, no one wants to be doing runs to the post office for a dollar.
With products from the US, I've routinely bought things from Amazon and shipped US-AU and saved money easily - hard drives, memory cards, and even things for which the shipping should make it cost prohibitive like a full-size baby pram.