Looks like first class package from US to Australia would be about $7.  I think I'd have to take it to the post office to be sure.  I actually needed to check this anyway, because I'm sending a little handmade notebook to a friend in Queensland.

It took me a while to find this info, btw.  All searches sent me directly to priority mail, which was indeed around $36-45.  I had to dig to find something other than Priority. Maybe there is something even cheaper?

Last edited by Spazmelda (13-3-2015 09:54:00)

There's another factor that's being overlooked: eBay has increasingly been forcing sellers into providing shipping prices and implementing automatic shipping calculators, which in my experience, are wildly inaccurate. And because global shipping can be a large variable in terms of cost, those who enter their own shipping price use an artificially high amount to cover themselves and make sure they don't get burned.

Several months ago I got into a back and forth debate with a seller who was local to me and had a shipping price listed for a portable machine that was a full three times higher than what the actual shipping cost should have been. He reasoned that he had once lost money on an eBay auction because the postage turned out to be much higher than he thought it would, and as a result he charges enough to make sure it doesn't happen again. I pointed out that all he had to do was go online, enter the dimensions of the package and its weight, and the post office's shipping calculator would provide him with an accurate cost (I use this feature often). Of course none of this mattered to him and in the end I picked up the typewriter in person to avoid his crazy shipping cost.

There's one other scenario to consider. Many seller's create auctions with very low starting bids or Buy-It-Now amounts and compensate for that by bumping up the cost of the shipping. One seller even admitted as much to me. He claimed that if the item sold for the opening bid that he would lose money on it, but because he had a very high shipping cost that it guaranteed a profit of some kind.

If I see a shipping cost that's too high - or too low (trust me, this can cause even bigger problems) - I always contact the seller directly and ask them to quote me a shipping price. Often this will result in a more realistic price, and you'll have that cost in writing should you win the auction and it comes time to pay.