focalist:
The ones I don't get at all are the components on ebay that you can get with free shipping. Yesterday, I bought twenty (two lots of ten) one-watt LED's for a grand total of one dollar and fifty cents INCLUDING SHIPPING. Sure, they take a month to arrive, but I get this type of stuff to shelve and pull out when there is something I want to do with it. There is NO way this company isn't taking a loss on every sale, yet they have (and will) run these kind of sales for months at a time-- this wasn't that much of a fluke in pricing, I maybe saved fifty to sixty cents over what I would normally pay-- meaning about $1.25 for ten one watt LED's. Shipped. From China.
I thought of that also when I started buying electronics parts from China on E-bay. I've come to the conclusion that the Chinese government must be somehow subsidizing the shipping costs, either by tax deductions or other methods to somehow make the shipping 'free' to the seller. How else could they do that? And it's not just a few of the Chinese E-bay sellers, but rather the majority of them selling inexpensive electronics parts. I get my stuff in 10-11 days constantly, and always seem to have to sign for delivery.
Lefty