Postage

[teatortay]

Not been selliing for a while so can some-one please tell me how much the postage iis on the eBay satchels..500gms, 3 kilo and 5 kilo.  Thank you.

[springyzone]

Tippy said:

Maybe I should have had a small business. When Mr Tippy was off work last year after having his throat cut out and subsequent treatment for his cancer, we were living below the poverty line, yet Centrelink wouldn't touch us. As far as they were concerned, because I had a part time income, we could survive with him being off work for almost 6 months. All we wanted was a health care card to help out with the enormous amount of medications he's now on for the rest of his life. It would have been the difference between $40 a month instead of nearly $400.

----------------------

You've hit on something I think is important. People with serious health issues or over a certain age should have access to a health care card, even if they are not eligible for welfare as such.

I have seen things like this in my own extended family. I would not consider it rorting a system to give a health care card to those people. In my view any family on under eg $100,000 a year should get the card if major ongoing health issues like that kick in.

Politicians don't necessarily rort the system but what is wrong there is they have quite legal concessions and payments well beyond what the normal worker could claim.

As for a pensioner or concession stamps. I think it is fair enough for the govt to have some limits on how many a person can buy per year. Lots of other things have limits, don't they. How much I can claim from my health care fund etc

So 50 seems a reasonable yearly limit to me.

But I don't have a problem with someone who is eligible for the 50 stamps using them however they want to use them. Are concession stamps different to any other stamp? I just imagined they would be the same stamps only sold cheaper? Don't know I have ever seen one.

But how a person uses their stamps is up to them, it wouldn't turn me off buying from them if they happened to use one on an ebay item.

[brerrabbit585]

---

@heihachi_73 wrote:
I still don't know why they have a hard limit of 50 concession stamps. If someone has a pensioner concession card, they should be eligible for as many concession stamps as they deem fit, not be restricted to a short supply of them like a food ration from the 1940s. 50 stamps may seem like a lot if it was a stereotypical 90 year old granny sending out the odd letter with one stamp on every envelope, but if you're mostly sending large letters with 3 or 5 stamps, they go quick smart.

Pensioners don't receive exactly 50 concession-fare trips on a bus or a train and then the driver/conductor checks a machine and says "Sorry, you used up your last concession fare yesterday, tickets will be $9.99 until the twenty-second of September when you were first issued your year's supply of concession fares."

---

If there were no limits then a person could buy more than they needed and let their family and friends all use them so they didn't have to pay full price.  At least with other concessions like cheap travel, electricity, etc, you have to produce a bit more evidence that the person using the service is the one entitled to the concession.

[heihachi_73]

If I had access to concession stamps all year around, my postage prices would reflect the concession discount, but when it's between 10 and 20 buyers who will receive concession stamps on their mail out of what could be 300 large letter sales in a 12 month period, it is pointless to revise well over a hundred listings for the relatively short time I have the stamps. Most people couldn't care less about the stamps on the front, the mailer/envelope gets torn open and thrown in the bin unless they plan on reusing it themselves.

springyzone: Concession stamps have the same base value as a normal stamp once stuck on a letter (which is currently $1.00 as of February 2017, in case someone reads this several years later), but do not have a price shown on the stamp itself. They are not 60 cent stamps. Currently, the designs are either that of a kangaroo or a picture of Australia (e.g. the continent) with "Concession POST" being printed in place of the value. The sheets always come with 3 kangaroos and 2 Australia maps. Mixing and matching concession with "full fare" stamps is possible, and I have had times where I ran out of stamps or needed an additional stamp due to being one or two grams over the 2 stamp limit and used normal $1 stamps bought over the counter and placed alongside the concession ones. Concession+concession+$1 stamp = $3 worth of stamps at the base rate, which is the amount required for large letters between 126 and 250 grams.

The problem people here have with concession stamps seems to be the fact that regular stamps went from 70c to $1 while the concession stamps didn't go up at all, and what ticks them off is that sellers are using them and still charging $1 per stamp. It is not feasible to revise over a hundred listings to include cheaper postage when only a handful will actually go at that rate before the stamps run out for another twelve months.

Taxpayers have been paying 40% of the concession stamp value because they still come in sheets of five for $3 each instead of being around $4 (80% rate) or $4.50 (90% rate). When the 70c stamps were around the concession rate was roughly 85.7% of the full price.

brerrabbit585: As for giving away concession stamps, that would be against the law, just like buying someone a concession myki/opal card when they are not entitles to concession fares. The difference being that the post office doesn't have a group of six burly ticket inspectors in black suits waiting to see your concession card and photo ID. The only way unused concession stamps would end up in the wild is if they were bought in bulk from multiple concession card holders and sold illegally, so maybe the post offices should stop giving them out in sheets or even entire books of them like they do, and only apply the concession stamps to the mail itself behind the counter when someone hands over their ID, concession and MyPost cards.

[domino-710]

Jeez,

I am going to use all of my allotment to send you all a greeting card.

[davewil1964]

If I had access to concession stamps all year around, my postage prices would reflect the concession discount

Which would give you an unfair advantage over your competitors who have to pay full freight for postage. Which was my point in the first place. And why you think this would be fair.

[*tippy*toes*]

Wouldn't we all love concession stamps all year round. That would solve so many problems! I don't have an issue what people do with their yearly allotment, that's their choice. I've had mail with them on and it doesn't bother me. I do have an issue with people's sense of entitlement and thinking they deserve an unlimited supply because they are running a business. Maybe they should ask Centrelink for a leg up when they declare their earnings each month. If you're running a business, then you can afford to pay the full amount, the same as the rest of us. By all means use your concession stamps, but don't whinge when they run out. You're making extra on the sales that don't reflect the discounted amount, so that should help towards the cost of full price stamps.

[lyndal1838]

But your buyers are paying the postage.  Why do you think it is OK to charge them $1 and then use a concession stamp?

[digital*ghost]

---

@heihachi_73 wrote:
If I had access to concession stamps all year around, my postage prices would reflect the concession discount, but when it's between 10 and 20 buyers who will receive concession stamps on their mail out of what could be 300 large letter sales in a 12 month period, it is pointless to revise well over a hundred listings for the relatively short time I have the stamps. 

---

I've a solution for you.  

To mitigate the accusation idea of overcharging 20-odd buyers by having (just as an example) $3 postage for everyone and refunding the people you mentioned earlier, charge everyone 10c less (so, $2.90), and divide that $20 PA saving between all your buyers so it's dealt with equitably. 

[heihachi_73]

Yes they are paying for postage, and I am legally entitled to use concession stamps in place of base rate stamps regardless of the perceived price. I do not need to put five concession stamps on a $3 large letter. Again, I am yet to receive even one solitary message about postage costs after a buyer has received their game.

davewil1964: Every seller on eBay has competitors from the minute they list their first item. I don't compete with game stores because I am a private seller, not a game store. A $1 or $2 postal "advantage" on a $4 item that has sat unsold since 2014 isn't going to break another seller (please check the EXIF information on my photos). They are $4 because no-one wants them; I could probably list half of the games at the $2 I paid for them a decade ago and still not get any sales.

[heihachi_73]

If I did that, people on here would still blast me for undercutting other so-called competitors by ten cents!