I order things online quite a bit. I appreciate the convenience and can often find pretty good prices. One thing that really burns me is when I find something offered at what appears to be a pretty good price only to find out that they rip me off with shipping and "handling charges. Now I have sold a lot of stuff online. I was once hired to evaluate and sell a warehouse full of equipment on Ebay. I quickly learned what it cost me to package and ship items. I did add a couple of dollars to the shipping price to cover boxes and packing materials.
As a knifemaker, I frequently buy bars of steel. Now this is about as un-fragile as you can get so a lot of packaging really is not necessary. just wrap it up and ship it.
A good example of this is this order I recently received from Admiral Steel in Illinois. I ordered 41 ponds of steel. They wrapped it in cardboard, taped it up and shipped it for a reasonable price.
I needed an extraordinary piece of steel for a custom order. I needed a bar of 440C stainless steel 3/8" thick, 3" wide and 24" long. I could find only one supplier, Fry Steel in California. So I called them. They had it in stock, the price of the steel was reasonable and the shipping cost was reasonable. But they wanted $40 to package it! I protested and argued but in the end I had no choice but to pay it. I needed the steel.
And so it arrives. Inside a very heavy cardboard tube plugged on each end with thick wooden discs is my single bar of steel. I had a heck of time getting into this thing! It's a good thing I happened to have a sharp knife handy. The steel weighed 7 3/4 pounds and shipping container weighed 4 1/4 pounds. So I not only ended up paying $130 for a $73 piece of steel, I paid increased shipping cost for the ridiculous shipping container.
I can't say I will never buy from Fry Steel again but it will only be if I have no other option. What a rip off.