There's a disturbing new trend on ebay I'm seeing in the past few months with toy sales, where shipping prices even within the continental US (no overseas shipping needed) which used to be in the single digits are creeping up, sometimes to quite unreasonable levels for small items, in many cases 14-17 dollars. Sometimes it will cost more to ship an item than the item is even worth.

Is there something behind this beyond the usual "ports backed up" phenomenon which doesnt seem to apply for internal US shipping? Some sellers still seem to have older, lower shipping rates, why is that, are they subsidizing the higher costs? Is this the end of small scale internet toy sales?