top | item 46591708

Postal Arbitrage

559 points| The28thDuck | 1 month ago |walzr.com

281 comments

order

_trampeltier|1 month ago

This story comes to my mind.

A pizzeria owner made money buying his own $24 pizzas from DoorDash for $16

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-p...

wizzwizz4|1 month ago

If you want to fight the VCs, you have to pull stunts like this. If they want to destroy local infrastructure because "free market", in an attempt to secure monopolies for themselves, then let them operate in a free market.

Spooky23|1 month ago

A friend of mine did this, and had the food delivered to himself.

They banned him eventually.

sudobash1|1 month ago

I feel I should point out that USPS has a lower rate for postcards (currently $0.61), so the threshold might be a bit lower.

I know that this is tongue-in-cheek and would be pretty funny to receive, but it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The experience of getting a little message printed on receipt paper is nothing like the experience of receiving a note or card in the mail. Through the mail you receive something physically from someone with their handwriting and some personality to it. Getting the Amazon message is more like printing out a text message on crummy paper.

Also, I don't have Prime, so it definitely isn't cost competitive for me anyway.

hatthew|1 month ago

I agree in general, but as a one-off thing I'd very much enjoy getting a lime with a message saying "this was cheaper than sending a letter myself"

dizhn|1 month ago

Reminds me of the old collect call trick. Rather than state your name when prompted you transmit a short, perhaps even coded, message. Then the receiving party declines the call.

systemtest|1 month ago

How can it be that low? The Netherlands has a stamp rate of €1.40 for 20 grams and you can traverse that country in three hours. 20 to 50 grams is €2.80. If you have to cross a border that goes up to €4.22

Can you send a letter thousands of miles for only 61 cents? That's amazing!

petcat|1 month ago

Not to mention that I would much rather give my $0.61 to a public service like the Post Office than to Amazon.

netsharc|1 month ago

Ah, luckily the climate doesn't mind that oil was extracted, a phone case was produced out of it, shipped from China, to end up not even being used but just as a "greeting card".

Why yes, I am fun at parties.

xxpor|1 month ago

The oil used for shipping from Shenzhen to Long Beach is completely trivial compared to what the truck used getting it from Long Beach to Pasadena.

crumpled|1 month ago

I'd send a free text message to a family member, offering them money in exchange for them not sending me trash from Amazon.

Waterluvian|1 month ago

A lot of profit is really just finding ways to hide the costs. Climate change is a massive withdrawal made on future generations.

account42|1 month ago

The climate does indeed not mind.

anukin|1 month ago

Ah yes the oil that you saved by not doing these got spent by the uber rich going to davos in private jets. Hell in fact even if a million of you saved it still would pale the damage done by private jets.

einpoklum|1 month ago

I call, and raise you my own sardonic answer (not this one, the top-level one). :-\

robrain|1 month ago

I’m in the same corner of the parties with you.

Also I’m passionately opposed to feathering billionaires’ nests, even with fractions of pennies of profit.

This story is funny, but also so so sad.

graup|1 month ago

Last time I checked (a few years ago), it was cheaper to send letters and small packages from South Korea to Germany than from Germany to Germany. The delay was also not that big (maybe 1-2 weeks instead of 3-5 days). I already envisioned an arbitrage business for this: a simple page where people upload their non-urgent letters as PDFs, and I just print and mail them from Korea.

Sesse__|1 month ago

This is already a thing; political parties sending out their mass mailings from Poland to Norway.

mystifyingpoi|1 month ago

In Poland, OLX (basically equivalent eBay) commonly has promotional campaigns, where you can buy something from a select category with 1 PLN shipping to box machine (around $0.30).

So people figured out, that you can abuse it to send anything to anyone in the country. Just create a fake listing for 1 PLN, let the receiver "buy" it (there is some extra service fee, but like $1) and there you go - probably the cheapest shipping possible, much cheaper than regular ~$5-7 box machine package.

corentin88|1 month ago

Same thing in France with Vinted

TrackerFF|1 month ago

I used to import a lot of stuff from the US to Norway. I lived all the way up in northern Norway, so parcels would take roughly 5 working days from Oslo to where I lived.

Domestic overnight mail / express mail was prohibitively expensive, something equivalent to $150 for small items.

However, if I ordered something via USPS International Express, those items would automatically be shipped as overnight / express mail once inside Norway, and handed to the Norwegian postal system. A parcel from New York to where I lived would take 2-3 working days, and as a bonus, USPS Int'l Express only cost around $50 for the same size parcel!

So while not the same type of arbitrage as OP posted about (where items become cheaper due to free shipping), I could save a lot of time and money.

Maybe a more extreme example would be the ultra cheap shipping prices from China. You paid like $1 in shipping, which would have cost $10 if you bought the same service domestically.

IIRC, the root of these practices go back many, many decades. And has a been a thorn on the side of modern shipping ever since Chinese e-commerce exploded.

stevage|1 month ago

Yeah in Australia I remember seeing a lot of small electronic items on eBay that were $1 shipped from Hong Kong or China. You literally could not post a letter within Australia for that price.

alibarber|1 month ago

It's similar here in Finland - I can get stuff from DigiKey with all taxes paid and whatnot, free shipping over 50eur and it'll arrive by DHL in less than 48hrs from the States.

If I order something locally, maybe it'll have made it to the departure sorting office in that time.

tallanvor|1 month ago

I'm guessing you quit after the small value toll exemption was removed?

abcd_f|1 month ago

> ultra cheap shipping prices

It’s either "ultra cheap shipping" or "ultra low shipping prices". Prices can't be cheap. /nitpick

johnfn|1 month ago

Somewhat off-topic, but when I click on "Case-Mate - Case for 2009 LG Xenon - Marsala"[1], the "About this item" section simply states:

About this item

- Do

- Not

- Buy

- This

- Product

What on earth is going on here?

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09D51KNQM

nunez|1 month ago

It might be a placeholder product to hold the ASIN.

Some (many?) vendors on Amazon will recycle pages this way. Sell some item, change the item and description to dummy values when it stops selling, change to another item that will be sold, repeat.

This is usually done to keep the reviews, though I've also heard about this being used for money laundering.

brk|1 month ago

It’s an 18 pound phone case for less than a dollar. How bad could it be?

crumpled|1 month ago

Jeff Bezos has more money than the Federal Trade Commission. That's how we pick the winner in any conflict.

jp191919|1 month ago

You can pre-order it...

I actually used to have(maybe still have?) a LG Xenon

bombcar|1 month ago

I've used something like this list to get "over the hump" for $35 to reach free shipping without prime.

It's horribly annoying to have a product that is $34.99 and you want it, but it'll cost shipping unless you get the damn Volkswagen screw; and then Amazon ships them individually anyway.

ornornor|1 month ago

You can also get preorder items, it adds to the total. Your actual items hips right away but the preorder doesn’t. Once you get your item, cancel the preorder and you’re done.

mystifyingpoi|1 month ago

Just play their stupid game. My wife does this all the time, buys random items just to go past the free shipping range, then the item goes into trash (or is returned, if possible).

Even sellers started doing this, but instead of selling random items, they sell "extra hardened packaging material" conveniently at $1, $2, $3... prices. Of course when item arrives, no extra material to be seen. When questioned, one of them said "well, the package had cardboard box - that's it, wink wink, please do not report us".

lkbm|1 month ago

I recently bought a small pack of pens because 1. I keep not having pens when I need them, but mostly 2. Subscribe and Save discount on some much higher priced increased by 5%-10%, easily overwhelming the price of the pens.

koyote|1 month ago

I have done this specifically with the second item in the list in the OP.

Not only did I do it to get free shipping, I got it to get free international shipping.

For extra bonus CO2 points, the other item was coming from a different country. So I basically paid $0.42 to have a single packet of kool-aid shipped across the pacific ocean.

(I'd never had kool-aid before and I must say I was disappointed.)

systemerror|1 month ago

Don't give money to amazon that is better spent on an amazingly efficient postal service. Amazon is subsidized by imaginary money until they put all their competition out of business(including USPS).

Fwirt|1 month ago

My honest question is: If you pull shenanigans like this, isn't it actually making Amazon burn through said imaginary money, thus hastening its demise? The cost of delivering a potato has to be on the order of at least a couple dollars.

vidarh|1 month ago

Can you explain? Amazon is wildly profitable, and while AWS is far higher margin than their retail businesses, everything I can find suggests their retail segment also has a healthy operating margin.

dec0dedab0de|1 month ago

I hate USPS, and will not be doing anything to benefit them until they offer a way to limit my deliveries to once a month, and opt out of anything that has "or current resident"

At the very least they should charge more for bulk mail, not give out discounts.

pruetj|1 month ago

Funny seeing this. I've been working on a site to allow people to send a letter as cheaply and conveniently as possible. I actually think letters (physical) are a great way to make an impression, often times much more so than an email. Had never considered sending an actual object lol.

At current scale (which is very small), the cheapest I can get it down to without losing money is $1.55 per letter (postage, paper, print, envelope, stripe fees, misc. hosting fees, etc.). Sadly, I have no way to compete with a $0.25 lime!

If you're curious, https://mappymail.com

Imustaskforhelp|1 month ago

What if you also start providing the 0.25$ lime feature as well (by making use of the amazon prime itself as well?) xD?

jackfranklyn|1 month ago

The DoorDash pizza arbitrage comparison is apt. Both cases expose the same fundamental thing: venture-subsidised pricing creates artificial market conditions that clever people will exploit.

What I find interesting is how long these windows stay open. You'd think someone at Stamps.com or UPS would notice the pricing anomaly, but large organisations are often too siloed. The team setting international rates probably doesn't talk to whoever monitors small parcel economics.

The author mentions making a few hundred dollars - but the real question is scalability. At what volume does this become attractive enough for the postal services to close the loophole? There's probably a sweet spot between "not worth their attention" and "actually profitable."

sambaumann|1 month ago

Turns out, at least in my area, for the grocery items you need to buy at least $25 worth to qualify for the free shipping.

modeless|1 month ago

Yeah, this is misleading. You can't send a lime for $0.25. It's $3.24 minimum.

andy99|1 month ago

I canceled prime ~8 years ago because where I am, half the stuff I wanted was considered an “add on item” that could only be shipped free if you had > $35 of other stuff, which is a complete scam because you get that without prime.

Maybe that was just for me (in a large Canadian city at the time) or maybe they don’t do that anymore?

I haven’t considered getting prime since, it would be a lot more interesting if it actually provided the shipping terms they advertise.

sciurus|1 month ago

I checked the first five items while logged in with Amazon Prime. They all required a minimum order of either $25 or $100 to get free shipping.

s0rce|1 month ago

I checked the lime listed and it seems to be a regular amazon prime item for me (norcal) and not the grocery you described, which we also have.

yujzgzc|1 month ago

It's not arbitrage until you can make money by selling something that costs you less than what you bought it for. What it is is bundled product (item + shipping) being priced lower than just one of the elements in the bundle (shipping) therefore making a case that one might as well always buy the bundle.

kmoser|1 month ago

Theoretically you can offer a service that sends a physical message for less than the cost of a letter, and use this hack to do it profitably.

stevage|1 month ago

Yeah, "arbitrage" is not the right term here. This is just a complicated way to get a lower quality version of a service (sending a letter by mail) at a lower price.

TheJoeMan|1 month ago

To the author, would you consider changing the “key photo”? I sent the weblink to a friend, and the key photo in iMessage is the pregnancy test and they got the wrong impression about the site/prank. Pick the lemon or can of beans perhaps?

kyleee|1 month ago

Link previews were a mistake

munificent|1 month ago

I would delight to receive birthday cards in Maruchan Ramen form.

stevage|1 month ago

There are some of us going to great lengths to reduce the amount of plastic we consume, the crap we buy and then throw out, distances travelled on our behalf.

And then there are these people. Sending a pregnancy test to their grandma. What a hoot!

globular-toast|1 month ago

Sometimes it's a curse to think. My friend group years ago started "Secret Santa" at Christmas and I quickly realised it wasn't about giving useful or even entertaining gifts, it was just about the joke of the item itself. The more useless or stupid the better! I didn't realise this and chose a gift I thought would be appreciated but they were super disappointed that they weren't part of the joke. I've boycotted Secret Santa ever since.

jervant|1 month ago

There are also things on eBay with a starting price of less than a dollar with free shipping that never get bids. I "won" two auctions like this the other week for brand new USB-C cables, each of them costing me 13 cents shipped.

I have no idea why sellers would do this with eBay fees and USPS small package shipping costing well over 13 cents.

crazygringo|1 month ago

Presumably they are inexperienced sellers who haven't learned about reserve prices?

Now you're part of their education.

Or... they are sophisticated and trying to get a ton of relatively inexpensive positive ratings before selling things that are actually expensive?

qingcharles|1 month ago

I did this on a mass scale. There are auction items that close at 1 cent with free shipping, so I signed up for the eBay API and wrote a bot to scrape all the auctions and bid one cent on them a minute before they closed.

I ended up with an enormous overflowing mountain of packages every day for weeks. I might have gone crazier, but there was a serious bug in eBay's checkout. Try checking out with 400 items in your cart. It really gets upset.

99% of the packages were Chinese sellers but the packages all came from Mongolia, so there must be some sort of postal arbitrage going on there.

It was all random stuff. Hairclips, 500 bicycle lamps. Dozens of tubes of ICs of every flavor. Crazy times.

gowld|1 month ago

Debunked in the first click:

$0.25 - Lime - Amazon Fresh -FREE 2-hour delivery on orders over *$100*

Other products have similar shipping restrictions, or the prices are higher than claimed.

Also, most of the cheapest products (at least before tariff effects kicked in) don't allow customized messages that postcards allow, for obvious reasons.

dawnerd|1 month ago

This needs to be updated to check if an item is just local delivery. Most of the items are not available for delivery unless you live close to a fresh.

einpoklum|1 month ago

> You're not only saving money.

That's right, you're also cementing Amazon's control of the US economy. Both by doing more business there, and by spending time on that site which will lead to you doing even more of your business there. Not to mention having to be an "Amazon Prime" person to begin with.

This may sound weird to some, but - you should really avoid using Amazon where possible.

babelfish|1 month ago

Riley Walz is easily one of the most creative people in tech today.

cypherpunks01|1 month ago

Yes, Jmail.world and the entire Jmail suite is mind-blowingly impressive, apparently Walz and @lukeigel co-created it.

danesparza|1 month ago

Yes, but Amazon Prime costs $140 a year.

That means you would have to do these shenanigans roughly 1/3 of the year without ceasing before you even started to touch Amazon's profit margin for your account alone.

non-|1 month ago

If you have Prime it's probably already justified by your normal usage. So shenanigans are effectively free.

nzealand|1 month ago

Looks like they already closed this arbitrage opportunity?

When I try to ship a lemon to a friend I get "There was a problem with some of the items in your order (see below for more information): Sorry, Lemon can't be shipped to the address you selected. Please remove the item or select another address."

Pity, my friend needed a lemon, to know I was thinking of him.

Edit: I can ship a lemon for $3 shipping if I select my friends address prior to adding the lemon to the cart, but with no option for a gift note that I can see.

ck2|1 month ago

A more recent question I have is how Amazon is skipping DeMinimis fees which are now massive on 50 cent or $1 items from their "Amazon Haul" which come from overseas

It arrives in a few weeks by Amazon's own carriers, not USPS/UPS/FedEx

Who is paying the $80 DeMinimis fee on the $1 cable I got last week from China?

rootusrootus|1 month ago

Is it always $75 minimum, or is it alternatively 90% ad valorem?

blauditore|1 month ago

I'm super surprised there is still free shipping for small things. In (some) other parts of the world, they will charge significant delivery fürs for anything below $50 or so. It basically changed during Covid, and since every shop is now doing it, there's no competition on that.

rahimnathwani|1 month ago

At the time of writing, the cheapest item in the list is a $0.25 lime.

When I add that to my basket and go to checkout, the only available delivery option 'Fast - Tomorrow' costs $2.99.

There is a non-food item in the list, which costs $0.51+tax, i.e. $0.54 including free shipping.

bee_rider|1 month ago

A cheaper option (if we’re going to do away with the restriction that the post card should be sent by the sender) would be for the recipient to hook their printer up to the network, and just send bits.

It is better, actually, you can even scan a real hand written post card.

wizzwizz4|1 month ago

We could even make a standardised protocol, where anyone could send messages to any connected printer: like letters, except a facsimile of the original document is produced. I'm struggling to think of a catchy name for this, though.

sudobash1|1 month ago

You can even still do fax machines if you really wanted to.

dec0dedab0de|1 month ago

owning a printer is never the cheaper option.

crazygringo|1 month ago

I get the point, but this seems pretty out of date. Seems like it needs a [2025] (?) at least.

A couple of these are still valid with Prime, but most of them are Amazon Fresh items ($9.95 service fee for orders under $50), or out of stock, or the price is now way more.

cameronehrlich|1 month ago

Send a $0.01 check with your bank’s Bill Pay feature, and write your message in the memo.

tempestn|1 month ago

As a Canadian, the free printing and mailing of paper checks anywhere in the country is perhaps the wildest US bank feature to me.

cadamsdotcom|1 month ago

Tempted to start paying cash to mates to drive us to and from the airport. We have to pay for the ride either way - may as well put it in a friend’s pocket.

Tempted to vibecode a little tool to manage ride requests..

kazinator|1 month ago

Has this person tried it?

Doesn't Amazon shipping have to go to the billing address on the credit card?

Being able to purchase on a credit card and have it sent anywhere makes it that much easier to use stolen credit cards.

AnssiH|1 month ago

> Doesn't Amazon shipping have to go to the billing address on the credit card?

No, I've had stuff shipped to plenty of addresses.

umanwizard|1 month ago

> Doesn't Amazon shipping have to go to the billing address on the credit card?

No and that would be crazy. I'm not aware of any e-commerce site that has a restriction like that.

> Being able to purchase on a credit card and have it sent anywhere makes it that much easier to use stolen credit cards.

Well, it's probably one fraud signal among many, but it's absolutely not generally prohibited. I've sent things from Amazon to other people (or to myself while staying in a hotel), and other people have sent things to me, many times.

toast0|1 month ago

You have to provide the billing address for the card. But you don't have to ship there.

Plenty of people ship to the office. I buy stuff for my parents from time to time. When I'm on vacation, I might ship to the hotel or a friend I'm visiting or ...

SoftTalker|1 month ago

Pretty sure if you buy something as a "gift" (which is what allows the inclusion of a message) then you can send it to a different address. I rarely use Amazon and never have used it to send a gift so could be wrong.

focusedone|1 month ago

All of these items appear to have received the HN hug of death. They're all showing as unavailable for me, who just wanted to drop a friendly lime hello to a friend across town.

ekropotin|1 month ago

But the cost of Amazon Prime have to be factored in as well

bigstrat2003|1 month ago

Only if you weren't already paying for Prime. If you were, then it's irrelevant as this usage adds no marginal cost.

happyopossum|1 month ago

No, for anyone considering doing this it does not have to be factored in as it’s a sunk cost.

kazinator|1 month ago

Why stick to strictly under $78? Something that costs $2 with free shipping has a built in $0.78 discount if you consider its free postcard function.

scottmcdot|1 month ago

Is there a simple way to search for everything and order by price descending? I'm in Australia so those items aren't much use.

ada1981|1 month ago

The lime is .25 but the s&h is 2.99 even with Prime; and tax too.

Prime seems to only offer free shipping if it’s over $25?

keepamovin|1 month ago

This is beautiful. Thank you for this! Beautifully execute, beautiful idea :)

languagehacker|1 month ago

Isn't postal arbitrage how the original Ponzi scheme started?

wat10000|1 month ago

Indeed. Ponzi attempted to buy International Reply Coupons in countries where they were cheap, then exchange them for stamps in the US and sell the stamps for much more than the purchase price of the IRC.

Of course, it didn't work. There wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with the arbitrage scheme, but the profit per coupon was way too low to make it feasible as a business. Ponzi pivoted to paying off older investments with new investments, and the rest is history.

Jill_the_Pill|1 month ago

How much did they pay to have Prime? Have to add that in.

autoexec|1 month ago

Exactly. It'd probably take a while before you actually cost amazon more than what you'd already paid them in shipping plus the cost of all the <78 cent items you sent along with your messages.

While screwing over amazon is noble enough, the end result of people doing this would only result in higher fees for prime and fewer items being eligible for "free" shipping. At the same time, you'd be depriving a very valuable public service of the few cents they ask to offset the cost of message delivery to anywhere in the nation. I'm sure they'd be happy to deliver something besides spam too.

sanex|1 month ago

Just sent my friend a bag of gravy mix, thank you!

euroderf|1 month ago

As an ex-pat, I'm really surprised by the pervasiveness of Amazon in the US. I guess if you wanted to quickly convert the US economy to market socialism, the first step might be to nationalize Amazon, fix the treatment of its workers, fix the IPR-related crap, electrify all of its transport, and then base the country's consumer economy (of non-perishables, for simplicity) around the resultant post-Amazonian logistics spiderweb. "Now with delivery drones on land, sea, and air!"

ramonga|1 month ago

This is why my AWS bill is so high?

chatmasta|1 month ago

This is just being rude to delivery drivers.

rationalist|1 month ago

I think they would prefer to deliver small items than large, heavy items.

amiga386|1 month ago

This is madness. Prime costs $139 per year. It may be a sunk cost for you, but it's explicitly a cost.

Try giving the USPS $139 per year and see what you can send with them.

Surac|1 month ago

this is a litte bit like the AI bubble works. I can't point to the thing with my finger but it feels wrong.

dheera|1 month ago

I mean, you just gave Amazon free advertising, which is kinda what they probably were looking for.

m-hodges|1 month ago

lol everyone in the comments is taking this way too seriously

deviation|1 month ago

Here in Ireland, a stamp is 1.85eur.

So. Many. Possibilities.

pkaye|1 month ago

Wow didn't realize its much more expensive in some places outside the US. I'd think the smaller land area would make it cheaper.

NedF|1 month ago

[deleted]

JSR_FDED|1 month ago

There’s an even better way to send an actual letter for free.

Simply switch the destination address on the envelope with the sender address, and drop it in the mailbox.

When then post office returns the letter to sender because of insufficient postage it will have delivered the letter for you.

lkbm|1 month ago

Keep in mind that in the US this is illegal, and it's unreliable, since insufficient postage mail isn't necessarily returned. This is one of the oldest forms of mail fraud, and they're well aware of it.

astura|1 month ago

Mail fraud is illegal, dude.

crumpled|1 month ago

I can almost guarantee that everyone mentioned in that blog post is a habitual Amazon user. They're all renewing Prime each year at full price and making a ton of regular purchases. The family has even turned on the FOMO by making Prime a family social network with social pressure to stay. I see it as a self-own, personally.