[silisili]

That's really interesting, thanks for your perspective. I tried to be careful not to blame the buyers but the forwarders. From a seller's perspective, they are a pain, and leave us wondering when and if a product will be delivered. I once sold a nice watch that way, and paid a lot to insure it. About 2 weeks later, I get the shipment back with REFUSED scrawled on it. I offered to refund the buyer minus shipping fee, which then led to a big back and forth fight via ebay. I felt sorry for them, paying for nothing, but why should I have to eat that? In the end, I won but refunded half the shipping cost as a gesture of good will.

In any event, I'm curious why it's cheaper to buy things from the US? Is it to do with tariff wriggling, or is business locally that inefficient? In that I mean, it seems some local company would realize they could import say a thousand Iphones, mark them up slightly, and make money while being cheaper than you paying to ship a single one from the US.

[bruce511]

A combination of taxes, tariffs and an extra middleman.

If I buy an imported product here I pay local sales tax, import tariff (indirectly) and the overhead of a local importer/shop. If I buy on ebay, especially if its second hand, I pay little to none of that.

(actually, in practice, the govt here has figured it out and sales tax and tariff are usually collected on incoming shipments - stuff acquired in person overseas are more or less not paid. Depending on your country ymmv.)

But local importer & retail alone can add plenty to the overhead, and hence retail price.

Of course buying from the US this way is still very expensive, the real value is in buying direct from China.

[rafaelm]

Oh don't get me wrong, I totally understand your point as a seller. What's weird to me is that the seller gets blamed, even after the shipment is marked as delivered by UPS/Amazon logistics or whatever company was used to drop it off in Miami.

Unfortunately, I'm very familiar with the scamming culture around these parts as well:/

[rafaelm]

Regarding your question, I believe it's mostly down to corruption basically. Local businesses have huge markups because they have to deal with theft, paying off customs officials even if they have all the paperwork etc as well as the taxes. As others have mentioned, these freight forwarders have figured out ways to get around that, probably with more bribing, not paying import taxes etc. It's a never ending corruption cycle and the customers are part of it.