well, you can't blame a vendor for shipping costs, in my opinion. typically, they do not gouge you for the shipping costs. usually markups can be found in the actual cost of the product (actually, almost all of the time). if you want to look at shipping costs, we just had $113,000 worth of servers shipped to us. thats around 1,900 lbs of servers.

do keep in mind that $6.95 for shipping via one of the big guys (FedEx, UPS, or DHL) will be about right for a smaller product. heck, we're charged $25 or so to ship things via FedEx for some items to our other business units.