Good afternoon eBay peeps!!   So.. this is something I've been wondering a lot lately and I'm wondering if anyway may know the answer...   How on earth does china ship items for free when the item they are selling is only worth $1 ???   I saw a cute bow online for one dollar from china and they offered free shipping... I have no doubt the item would be rubbish but never the less.. how do they get such cheap shipping??   All comments welcome 😄

It's not just about shipping - the products themselves probably cost under $1 to make, but there would be little to no profit on those items even with paying only 10c for shipping. There are so many sellers in China selling the same thing, that $1 free-post items would have the same function as a loss leader does here, and ultimately, losing a few cents on one of those sales - even if that's x 1000's - would be made up in their other sales (if you look at the prices on some of their other items, you'll see that they'll have a few things that can be as much as 10 times the price of the cheapest seller, they mightn't sell many, but when someone is lured by a cheaper item and visits the store, it's not uncommon to pick up an extra thing or two).

A lot of the sellers I buy items from run 1c auctions with free post, and I have won quite a few for less than $1, but they also pool their resources. There's about 6 very high volume Chinese sellers that send their items together, i.e. if I buy a dozen items from 3 or 4 of them over a couple of days, I know they'll all come in one parcel.