And what do they deem as excessive shipping charges? I see the example of $75 for shipping. Which, in most cases is excessive. But i have seen some comments on this board that suggest that $40-50 for shipping is money making. That is simply not the case. If a seller is assigning a fixed shipping price on an item, they dont know where the buyer is going to be located. Odds are, they are going to be at the farthest point from them. And shipping a gun across the country can easily cost $40 or more. Especially if insurance is purchased. And, shipping materials have to be factored in too. Proper boxes and packing materials are not cheap. So, for a 2-3 day priority service, $40-50 is not really excessive.
And i am all for discouraging reserve auctions. They are pointless and just clog up the site.
I just arranged shipping for a gun I bought on Gunbroker. The seller says he is using a shipping service called ShipMyGun. ShipMyGun had my FFL in their database, so I did not have to get an FFL copy to send to the seller. The total cost for shipping was $30.00 including $500.00 insurance. Shipping distance is over 1000 miles. I do not yet know how well they will pack my gun for shipping, so can't comment on that yet.
I agree that Gunbroker should have done something about excessive and Reserve auctions that are repeated for years in the hopes of reeling in a sucker. If they needed more revenue, they could have started charging a sliding listing fee that increases each time a gun is relisted. But I can see how that would be hard to enforce if a seller merely changed something when relisting a gun for the umteenth time. It would enhance my experience if we could at least filter out the sucker fishermen when we do our searches.
