Why can't you do a product search on Item Price & Postage Combined?

BrickinBox

This issue is really starting to bug me. The current system just means that sellers list items for pennies, but add a stupidly high postage, just to get the top listing. I want to be able to search on the price and postage combined. The cheapest item with postage should be the top listing, not someone with $15 minimum postal charge.

Calibrick

There are definitely older threads on this, it's been requested before. If I recall (and I do WHOLEHEARTEDLY agree with you!), the issue is that if a user is not logged in, the system does not know their address so cannot auto-calculate the shipping cost field to be able to sort on it.

I would propose that this column simply isn't sortable if the user isn't logged in and make that a sortable column if the user IS logged in.

Calibrick

Also, there is a question of how to sort those with "request a quote" only... while you are required to have at least one shipping option on top of that here, it may not necessarily apply to say sets of a certain size (like my store).

HeartlandBrix

Upvoted.

HeartlandBrix

It also just occurred to me that a store using the strategy BrickinBox describes could also contribute in a negative way to the sales history. Hopefully I'm overblowing this and the "sell-below-market-and-make-it-up-in-shipping" strategy isn't widely used, so the impact would be minimal.

Shipping probably isn't included in the historical average price. The store(s) using this pricing strategy may not see an issue with it because they're making up the loss in shipping, but it would pull the part's average selling price down. That would affect anyone using that measure as a guide for their own store. I don't pay close attention to individual stores' pricing, but I do reference that average selling price quite often.