while walking my dogs ....

[mike_jayroe]

this morning a thought popped into my head.

How many orders have you had that shipped less than 100 miles from your location? I believe for me it is around 3. The great majority have gone at least 500.

Just curious.

[gator08041971]

Actually so far, none.  But then I live in the middle of nowhere, so I'm already far from things.  I mean the nearest WalMart is an hour away.  So is the nearest fast food place.  lol

[diecastorbust]

I brought that up a couple of months ago and how coincidental every order ships to the most exspensive places from my location. All that tells me is eBay doesn’t maximize my exsposure like they should when they all buy force us to use promoted listings. What’s it up too now 12-18 percent extra we all have to pay to bee seen and that’s not enough make it so we are only seen where eBay can. Make an extra 5-10 cents per sale on just the shipping. Can’t tell you when the last time I shipped within my own state. I’m glad somebody else notices be warned you’ll get the comments from ones that say your just a horrible seller and eBay is never wrong. Funny if eBay is never wrong how come every time a new  update comes out the sellers take a hit and not eBay. Doesn’t seem like a glitch when it always favors EBay. Seems like it was a we hope nobody notices and if the do we say whoops. There’s definitely people who notice these things like you!

[pickapaper]

In more than 25 years of selling on eBay, I have had very few sales that were less than 100 miles away and many of those were items that were locally associated, i.e. town related.  I'm in the middle of the country and the majority of my sales go to either coast.

[mcdougle4248]

In my experience over 12 years, a total of about 20 orders have gone to buyers located less than 100 miles from me. Most of my instate orders go to the Phoenix metropolitan area, about 190 miles away. I get about 5 orders each year from the Phoenix area.

ETA: I have over 42,000 transactions to date, so locally shipped transactions are a meager percentage in the big picture.

[isaiah53-57]

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@mike_jayroe wrote:

this morning a thought popped into my head.

How many orders have you had that shipped less than 100 miles from your location? I believe for me it is around 3. The great majority have gone at least 500.

Just curious.

---

We live on the east coast in a state that has no sales tax an hour away from one of the most populous regions in the nation and we had an inordinate amount of sales going west of the Mississippi...

Our thoughts are this is not due to statistical anomalies - It was this way the entire time we sold on this account from 2014 to 2020 - We feel it was by design to artificially inflate the total transaction amounts in order to increase the amount of fees retained. Just more shadowy money grubbing in our most humble opinion - All the policies, tactics, strategies and programs behind greedflation is what eventually led us to stop listing here... We can only imagine how much stronger our sales could have been if they were featured showings in our state with no sales tax along with the cheapest shipping cost.

[aproudparent2010]

I had an order that they lived 19 miles from me and wanted it shipped and it was a small item.

They paid around $5 in shipping I think

[luckythewinner]

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@mike_jayroe wrote:

this morning a thought popped into my head.

How many orders have you had that shipped less than 100 miles from your location? I believe for me it is around 3. The great majority have gone at least 500.

Just curious.

---

The continental United States is 2800 miles wide, and 1600 miles high.

Google says the average distance between two random points in a 1x1 square is .52, so if the US it were a square of 1800 miles, the average distance between any two points would be 936 miles.

So the fact that the majority of your packages have gone over 500 miles seems logical and expected.

[luckythewinner]

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@aproudparent2010 wrote:

I had an order that they lived 19 miles from me and wanted it shipped and it was a small item.

They paid around $5 in shipping I think

---

They made a good decision. At 30 miles per gallon, that round trip of 38 miles would cost them about an hour of their time and $4.30 in gas.

[deserdog]

I have been selling on Ebay for 24 or 25 years, so I have had a few. Probably had 4 or 5 , at least, in my own town.

[deserdog]

I just think it is just more where the people are. The population, in 2019, of southern California was 23.86 million. I live in Southern California. And many of my sales go to Southern California. I looked at my Pirate Ship stats, and 13.14% of my sales have gone to zone 1-2. by the way, zone 2 goes out to about 150 miles or so.

[mordecai8614]

As someone who lives in a large metropolitan area, I get quite a few. Closest was like 3 miles

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

I've had some, certainly not a lot, but, given where I live, what I sell, and given the laws of probability, I'd say that's to be expected.

The other theory is that ebay deliberately tries to ensure my items go to Zone 8 (or close to it) so ebay can make more money on shipping fees. 

Take your pick. 

[postcardcountry]

Most of my sales are indeed more than 100 miles away.  As someone else mentioned, the closer ones are normally town related.

I sold one item to someone in the same state, about 3-4 hours away.   It took an extra 6 days for USPS to deliver it.  I sent a message telling her "if I'd known how long it would take, I'd have done a road trip and delivered it myself".   Got back an "LOL, thats okay, all our mail is delayed."   Her's go through one of those USPS historical bottlenecks.

[varebelrose]

I'm in central Virginia. Out of the last thousand or so items we sold, easily 50% were within the state, maybe 5% were actually local pickups.