jonathanbrightlight Volunteer Community Mentor
If they are a large volume seller they may have an account with USPS that gives them volume discount rates for bulk shipping. They must ship a certain amount of items in a given time frame.
https://www.usps.com/business/business-shipping.htm
If you look at @ebooksdiva 's screenshot, you'll note they not only have a minimum quantity for volume discounts, but most types have to be presorted as well.
Even so, those big sellers aren't making much in profit on those items, but they make up for it in volume (and possibly with other more expensive and profitable items), both just by selling a ridiculous number of them, and offering deals that make it appealing for customers to buy multiples from them. A lot have something like Buy 3 Get 1 Free deals offered on their listings, which means they're only paying for one shipping label for 4 or more DVDs if a customer takes them up on that deal, and the profit margin just greatly expanded.
It's hard to comprehend sometimes the scale difference, too. You have a respectable selling history and have about 3,300 feedbacks, so I'm guessing you're approaching or have exceeded 10,000 lifetime sales, if your percent of feedback to orders matches up with what I've commonly seen. The company I sell for has about 16,000 feedbacks, and our store page says we've sold 47,000 items (so while we've sold more, that's not a huge difference).
I was just looking at another bookseller (there are megasellers that primarily sell DVDs and Blu-rays in this same range for total sales) who had a whopping 3.5 MILLION feedbacks. If they get feedback for 30% of their orders (which they probably don't, industry averages are lower), that means they've sold around 11-12 million items (or actually, 11-12 million orders, many of which could have been multiple items). EDIT: I just thought to pull up the store of the seller in question, and it is even higher than that, it shows 19.5M items sold.
That difference is staggering and difficult for me to comprehend.
