I emailed BrewHa earlier today, probably the reason he posted on here. Afterwards he emailed me back and to thank me for my "tip" he offered to send me a free bottle opener. Sooo... They have the means to send me a bottle opener for free, with free shipping, for complaining about their price and telling them that they are losing business, but they don't have the means to lower shipping on an element that weighs, what, a pound or two max? Put it in one of those if it fits, it ships boxes from USPS. It'd cost five bucks. Charge me ten. Better than 30.
I'm not trying to justify the sellers position, but potential buyers clearly don't understand large/medium business shipping reality. That bottle opener may well fit in an envelope and go out with the days mail, after running though a postage machine. Can't do that with a heating element.
As a mfg small business owner, I can appreciate the sellers position on alternate shipping methods. While shipping with any company may be 'easy' to do, packaging materials, proper shipping label stock, and configured options in their software may make it impossible, or at least very inconvenient.
If we were to get a request to ship with Airborne, for example, our answer is NO. While we could do it, it would add a significant amount of time and effort, easily exceeding the actual shipping cost, and eat up profit.
We use builtin shipping options with Quickbooks for all our shipping. This limits us to UPS, Fedex and USPS. All 3 require us to have accounts, and with USPS the account must be pre-funded. Before QB integrated with these services shipment processing took about 5 times longer than it does now, for every shipment. For freight shipments we need yet more accounts, FedEx Freight, TNT, etc. Not to mention international shipments.
On a $20 item we manufacture (consumer item, vs large commercial sales) the margins are very slim to start with, otherwise we would not have any buyers. Do this for 30 years and you'd understand a lot better!
Clearly $30 is an outrageous amount, but that might be what it takes to manage non-standard shipping methods. For those that don't know, the commercial shipping options these shippers offer can be very different from those used by small businesses, or individuals. Minimums, volume discounts, on-demand pickups (extra $), etc. UPS charges us to show up at our door every day, with the amount varying on our shipping volume, but that pickup fee never goes to 0. If you don't have daily pickups, on-demand pickup has an extra charge. Dropping off shipments is even more 'costly'.
Hope this helps people realize they may well not be out to rip you off.