The short story:
I won an auction for a bike trailer on ebay. The seller (who is a consignment ebay re-seller) stated in the listing "I ran a shipping quote from San Francisco to New York and it came to $140. The shipping price will decrease as you get closer to San Francisco from New York, and larger as you get further away from San Francisco." Based on my location (a suburb of another moderately-big city) I expected to pay between $110 and $125.
The next day, the seller invoices me for winning bid + $108 for shipping. Sounds good, so I pay the total.
A couple days later I get an email saying that "Our shipping company has packaged your item for shipping, but the price to ship is significantly more than our original estimates. Please let us know how you would like to proceed." There was a forwarded email from a shipping company saying the price for shipping would be $186.
I understand that shipping is more than they estimated, but I have had to dip into the sale price in order to ship items before. I am sympathetic, but also feel it is a little too late to ask for more money than the listing estimated and especially after invoicing me for shipping at a much lower rate. I figure I have three options:
1. Refuse to pay more for shipping than already invoiced. Seller may not ship the item, and I would likely have no recourse other than a refund and leaving bad feedback.
2. Offer to compromise and meet them in the middle somewhere, maybe the original $140 from the listing. Seems arbitrary, but would still be a fair price for the trailer, and they are more likely to agree to send it.
3. Pay for the full shipping price that they emailed in the update. Not happening, since it would no longer be worth it to me, and I wouldn't have bid if they said shipping would be that high.
What do you think? Am I being reasonable?
Thanks for your help.