I disagree that it's exploitative. It's simply easier. Recalculating shipping costs on a combinatatorial basis has a nonzero cost from a programming and operations POV.
Having a fixed per-item shipping costs lowers overhead drastically, especially for smaller sellers. Large sellers obviously have different customers and I doubt they get away with just multiplying PER_ITEM_SHIPPING_COST X NUMBER_OF_ITEMS (I didn't think that was the focus on the OP though).
I also disagree that it does not generally apply. Given two items, A & B, you might have the following total:
In other words, no matter what, shipping more items does cost more than shipping less items. So it makes sense to charge more for it. How much more is a matter of economics.
Having a fixed per-item shipping costs lowers overhead drastically, especially for smaller sellers. Large sellers obviously have different customers and I doubt they get away with just multiplying PER_ITEM_SHIPPING_COST X NUMBER_OF_ITEMS (I didn't think that was the focus on the OP though).
I also disagree that it does not generally apply. Given two items, A & B, you might have the following total:
What you're saying is that: But what I'm saying is that: In other words, no matter what, shipping more items does cost more than shipping less items. So it makes sense to charge more for it. How much more is a matter of economics.reply