For the first time in many years my family cancelled our Amazon Prime subscription. We did it for a lot of reasons, but one of them was the (somewhat obvious) realization that free shipping isn't free, it's just prepaid and subsidized.
A quick look at eBay auctions for a given item will reveal (quite quickly) an interesting phenomenon: eBay Sellers will list the same item several times over with different prices, and different shipping costs. They often add up to the same total cost, but clearly buyers have different tolerance thresholds for what they'll pay for shipping vs what they'll pay for a product.
Much like with anything else that's "free", it's not free. Someone else is just paying for it (and sometimes that someone is just you)
A quick look at eBay auctions for a given item will reveal (quite quickly) an interesting phenomenon: eBay Sellers will list the same item several times over with different prices, and different shipping costs. They often add up to the same total cost, but clearly buyers have different tolerance thresholds for what they'll pay for shipping vs what they'll pay for a product.
Much like with anything else that's "free", it's not free. Someone else is just paying for it (and sometimes that someone is just you)