I would have loved to buy a $25 Atlantic City Playboy chip for $100, but I didn't. I bought nine different difficult-to-obtain regional chips for $15. Would you pay $50 to have them shipped to you? How about $15 to ship them? Of course not (presumably), since the actual postage cost was $1.70, and adding in the handling cost wasn't much more than a total of $2 or $3. So why would you (presumably) not pay $50 to have them shipped, since they would weigh nine times more than the shipment you *were* willing to pay $50 to have shipped? That's a clue about why the shipping charges are independent of the value of the item being shipped (apart from insurance, of course.)

The key difference you are missing, John, is that eBay wants to get their fair share of the seller's fee based on a percentage of the final selling price. If the price is actually higher (significantly higher, in my case over 100% higher) due to gouging on shipping costs, that's a violation of eBay's rules, and can be reported to them for possible (but not likely, imho) retribution.

WMD