Have Horse, Will Ship (not to you, though!): A meta-analysis of Model Horse Sales Pages and the rate of international shipping
First off, a massive disclaimer: As much as I like to pretend I am, I’m not really a researcher—not in the official sense, anyway. I’m not an academic, and I haven’t had any papers published. My qualifications are a BA with a major in Asian Studies (so not at all relevant to this), I’m currently doing a Master of Autism (via coursework—it’s not a research Master’s. Thus, also not at all relevant to this), but I’ve never done a single research subject in my life. I am, however, engaged to an academic researcher and thus have unfortunately picked up some stuff via osmosis, I’ve spent the past 7 years of my life at uni reading research and analysing it, and I am overall just a massive nerd.
I say this to try and ward off any comments about my failings in my analysis. I’m not properly trained, and I don’t know what I’m doing; this is just for fun, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The title is also just a piss take—this isn’t a meta-analysis at all, so please don’t come for me :P
With that out of the way, you might be wondering what on earth I did. Well, to put it simply, I sat down and, over the course of 14 days (from the 25th of March 2023 to the 8th of April 2023) went through every single ad on Model Horse Sales Pages (MHSP), wrote down every single seller’s name, and compiled the numbers of sellers who do ship overseas, and those who don’t.
Simple, right? :D
Abstract
Objective
First of all, I can’t believe I’m willingly sitting down to write an abstract. Trying to get me to do uni assignments normally is like pulling teeth; I start early and parcel out wordcounts so I only have to do 200 words a day, often left to the early evening in a desperate attempt at procrastination (my anxiety always wins, and I always end up doing my word count every day like a good little student). But I digress.
I, like many other international hobbyists, know the feeling all too well: You’re browsing MHSP and, to your surprise and excitement, you see that a grail has just been posted, and for a great price! You click the ad and read: No flaws, time pays welcome, shipping to the US PPD—here you’re nearly apocalyptic with excitement, before you see it. NO INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING!
There might be a reason: One person ruined it for everyone else. It’s too expensive. It takes too long. It’s too much of a hassle. But more often than not there is just a trite sorry! or at this time!, if anything at all.
Put simply, I wanted to examine this phenomenon in more detail. I wanted to find out how many of the American hobbyists with ads currently on MHSP would or would not ship overseas, and use that as a sample size to extrapolate theories on the prevalence of international shipping in the hobby.
Methodology
To achieve this, I opened the ‘Gallery’ page on MHSP, which shows you all the ads in every category, posted in chronological order from newest to oldest. I then opened each ad in a tab and noted down the seller’s surname and initials on a sheet of paper, before checking their policies and the text of the ad itself to see if they shipped overseas or not. I put every seller in three categories: ‘Yes’, as in yes they did ship internationally; ‘No’, as in no they did not ship internationally; and ‘Maybe/Don’t know’.
These last sellers often had yellow question marks in their international shipping boxes and did not mention international shipping in their policies. They may also have left the international shipping box blank entirely. Some also wrote “I MIGHT ship internationally depending on xyz” in their policies, so I placed them here.
As I went, I typed up the sellers’ names into two spreadsheets: one for international, one for US-based. I did this because once I hit 100 names, it was hard to keep flipping my pages over to look for names (to make sure I wasn’t doubling up on sellers).
Once I had finished, I had seven sheets of A4 paper with 602 names written on them, two columns to a page, double sided. More importantly, though, the numbers on my physical sheets of paper and the number of sellers on my spreadsheet did not match up—I had a difference of 5. I honestly wasn’t surprised by this, given that I was often doing this project late at night, and I’m not exactly a maths genius in the first place. To validate my final numbers, I then searched each seller’s name individually to find one of their ads, where I double-checked to see if they shipped internationally or not, and then marked them with a corresponding colour on my spreadsheet (green for yes, yellow for maybe, and red for no).
By the time I had finished, I had validated every single international name, but I had 14 US sellers I couldn’t find—I suspect their ads had expired or been deleted by the time I got around to doing this part, which was nearly two weeks after I begun. Thus, I discarded their names from the sheet as I couldn’t include them in the data, and pulled the final numbers from the colours in my spreadsheet.
Results
Of 602 total sellers, 470 (78.1%) were US-based and 132 (21.9%) were international.
Image description: A table lays out the numbers and percentages of American-based sellers and International sellers. There were 470 Americans in my sample data, representing a total of 78.1%. There were 132 International sellers, representing a total of 21.9%.
Of the three categories, 348 sellers (both US-based and international) were ‘Yes’, 173 were ‘No’ and 81 were ‘Maybe/Don’t know.’
This, however, is the raw data, and includes the international sellers. Thus, to get the true result, the number of US-based sellers on MHSP who do and do not ship internationally, I removed the international sellers and was left with this:
Image description: A table lays out the numbers and percentages for both American-based sellers and International sellers. For American-based sellers, 217 said yes they would ship internationally (46.1%), 81 said maybe (17.2%), and 172 said no (36.6%). For the international sellers, 131 said yes (99.2%), none said maybe, and one said no (0.8%).
So, to put it quite simply, if you’re an American venturing on to MH$P of an evening, wanting to buy a horse, you have a 99.8% chance of being able to get a horse sold and shipped to you. If you’re an international seller, however, your chance drops to 57.8%—and it drops even further when you exclude your international brethren for whatever reason, to a chance of just 46.1%.
To phrase it differently—and perhaps more bluntly—99.2% of international sellers will ship to America, but only 46.1% of American sellers will return the favour.
Image description: A screenshot of two complex tables. The first table, on the top, has the heading ‘Will Ship Internationally’ and three columns: Yes, Maybe, and No. It has three rows: American Seller, International Seller, and All Sellers. 217 (46.1%) American sellers say yes (and this number is highlighted in yellow), 81 (17.2%) say maybe, and 172 (36.6%) say no. For international sellers, 131 (99.2%) say yes, 0 say maybe, and 1 (0.8%) say no. For all sellers, 348 (57.8%) say yes, 81 (13.5%) say maybe, and 173 (28.8%) say no.
The second table, on the bottom, has the heading ‘Will Ship to America’ and the same three columns (yes, maybe and no) and three rows (american seller, international seller, and all sellers). 470 (100%) of American sellers say yes to shipping to America, 0 say maybe, and 0 say no. 131 (99.2%) of International sellers say yes to shipping to America (and this number is also highlighted in yellow), 0 say maybe, and 1 (0.1%) say no. For all sellers, 601 (99.8%) say yes, 0 say maybe, and 1 (0.20%) say no.
Limitations
Finally, I wanted to note some of the limitations of my little experiment!
As much as these numbers are a bit of a kick in the guts for us international hobbyists—not that it’s anything new, per se, but it sucks to see it in black and white—it would be remiss of me not to mention that things may not be as grim as they seem. There was a decent chunk of ‘maybes’, after all; I couldn’t definitively say whether these sellers shipped internationally or not. If asked, they may say no, but they may say yes, too! Thus, if you would like to be an optimist, these 81 people represent 81 potential additions to the ‘yes’ column :)
A friend of mine (and an actual researcher lol) pointed out that it would be interesting to note how many ads each seller had, to see if there was a correlation between the number of ads and international shipping status. I don’t really know why I didn’t include this data, as it would have been relatively easy for me to do so—I will do it next time.
Tim (also an actual researcher lol) added that given that this data investigates sellers, and not individual listings, the exact volume of horses available to international or American hobbyists may vary from these numbers. In my defence, I managed to find 602 sellers, but there were upwards of 7200 listings on MH$P at the time; 602 data points took me two weeks, so 7200 data points would have taken me 167 days, or 5.4 months!
Tim also rightly pointed out that this is a review of only one marketplace, and there are many more marketplaces used to sell horses (eBay, facebook, instagram, for example). I chose MH$P because the seller’s policies are clearly listed in the ad, and thus it made it relatively easy and quick for me to see the shipping status at a glance. I suspect that had I done this experiment on facebook, there would be a shitload more ‘maybes’, as not everyone remembers to put it in their ad.
As with any experiment, repetition is the best way to validate one’s results. This is a snapshot in time, and only a representative sample of two weeks of MH$P data, thus can’t really be used as a sword to wield and say “only 46.1% of American sellers ship internationally!”. Only 46.1% of American sellers, on MH$P, within the two weeks of time that this experiment ran, ship internationally; who knows if those numbers are different in the future! I do plan to run this experiment again, probably around Breyerfest time, and then a third time at Christmas. Thus I guess you could say this is a preliminary study, and it will be interesting to see if the numbers change throughout the year.
Discussion
I’d like to start by noting a couple of things about the results!
Firstly, I find it interesting that the percentage of US-based sellers was so high, at 78.1%. I don’t think this is a true representation of the makeup of the hobby; MH$P is a site made for and marketed towards Americans, so it makes sense that they would be the primary users, and that international hobbyists would choose to sell locally. Preliminary data coming out of my survey is showing the percentage of American hobbyists to be closer to 61%. I don’t think that number should be taken as gospel either, though, because I heavily marketed the survey towards international hobbyists, and I suspect that more than a couple of American hobbyists were turned away by my phrasing of the question of gender! If I had to guess, I’d say it was closer to 65-70% American—not as low as 60% like in my survey, but not as high as 78% from this MHSP data.
Anecdotally, I always prefer to, and often do, advertise my horses first to the Australian market, in Australian dollars. I often take a big loss on these sales, but for me it’s worth it: not because I can’t be bothered filling out a customs form, but because I like keeping the local hobby going and, if I’m honest, it feels like a small, petty way of sticking it to ‘the man’—the man in this case of course being the US hobby. We—international hobbyists—are not as much of a minority as one may think, but we are certainly treated like a complete afterthought much of the time. It does not make one inclined to give back and share.
So I use MHSP only if my horses don’t sell to the Australian market—then, and only then, do I list them to the US hobby in US dollars. I have a sneaking suspicion many other international sellers do the same (even if their motives aren’t as petty as mine), which would account for the inflated numbers of US sellers.
Secondly, I wanted to touch on some hypocrisy (I know, bold of me to speak about when I’ve just admitted to hoarding resins and flinging them at my fellow Australians to avoid them getting in the hands of the dastardly Americans!). When it came to the US-based sellers, there were a small number (11) who said that they would not ship internationally, but would make an exception for Canada. I’m sorry, but I find this policy extremely silly. I didn’t know if there was a reciprocal agreement when it came to packages, as in if you were shipping to Canada you didn’t have to fill out a form, but some of my followers informed me there is no such agreement in place. I suspect the majority of these sellers aren’t doing this because of the customs form, though; more likely it’s that because the horse has less distance to cover, it’s in the mail for a shorter period of time, and thus is less liable to break. Canada is also pretty close—it’s right there!—but this isn’t a super bulletproof defense because so’s Mexico, but I didn’t see a single seller say they’d only ship to the US, Canada, and Mexico.
As a result, I actually counted these sellers as part of the ‘no’ numbers. I did not consider shipping to two countries—out of a total of 195—to really count as international shipping.
I also added 13 sellers to the ‘no’ numbers because they said they would ship internationally, but did not take PayPal, only money orders or cheques. This move might be controversial, because of course, there’s nothing stopping me from trotting down to Western Union and sending off a money order to an American seller. I would posit, however, that in 2023 money orders generally are an uncommon way to pay, and nigh unheard-of for international transactions. I’ve been in the hobby for a while now—about 15 years—but I arrived after the rise of PayPal, so I have not personally experienced sending a money order overseas. One of my Aussie friends (who’s been in the hobby longer than I) said that pre-PayPal, it was really the only way to buy a horse from overseas. She also added, however, that she hasn’t paid for a horse using one for over 15 years, and hasn’t heard of anyone else doing so either.
Thirdly, I wanted to point out something interesting: four sellers that charged a handling fee specifically for international sales. Two of these sellers indicated that they were currently willing to ship internationally; two would not, perhaps suggesting these handling fees were outdated. Regardless:
Seller #1 charged a international handling fee based on the amount of the transaction: “$15 for items under $300. $20 for items over $301.” Seller #1 was no longer shipping internationally.
Seller #2 also charged a handling fee based on the amount of the transaction, but did not specify the amount: “I will be charging a foreign transaction fee for all foreign transactions starting 03/02/2022. This fee will be based off the number of transactions and dollar amount of each transaction.” Seller #2 was currently shipping internationally.
Seller #3 charged a flat handling fee for all international transactions: “For international transactions there is a $10 dollar handing fee.” Seller #3 was not currently shipping internationally.
Seller #4 also charged a flat handling fee for al international transactions: “INTERNATIONAL Buyers: Shipping charges are actual charges plus a $5 handling fee.” Seller #4 was currently shipping internationally.
I won’t mince words here. I find these policies unfair and, quite honestly, laughable. Charging anywhere from $5-$20 (or more!) for filling out a form is just absurd; if an international seller did it they’d be shit-talked on modelholics, but as international buyers, we just have to shut up and take it. And let me be clear, here—I don’t have a problem with charging everyone a handling fee (I won’t personally do it, but I understand why people do). But when you tack on an extra fee for international buyers, a fee that other American buyers do not have to pay, it permanently puts you on my ‘never-deal-with’ list.
(I know researchers are meant to avoid bias, but seeing as I’m not actually a researcher, I can kind of say whatever the hell I want in this blog post. So there!)
Finally I wanted to touch, ever-so-briefly, on that one outlier—the one international seller who won’t ship overseas. She’s actually Australian, which makes me smile—it’s the same petty part of me mentioned above that makes me take such silly glee in this little act of defiance. I truly didn’t think I would ever find an international seller who refused to ship outside their country, and her presence in the data proves that they are out there! I suspect, though, that usually sellers like her simply don’t advertise on MH$P and go through local channels instead.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed reading this! It bears repeating, just to make sure everyone understands, that I’m not a real researcher (and even if I was, I sure as heck wouldn’t be a quant researcher; numbers are not my forte) and I did this just for fun. Don’t take it too seriously, and don’t take the numbers as gospel. It’s just getting a very basic feel of things, the lay of the land, so to speak.
I also wanted to note that I’m not trying to demonise anyone for not shipping internationally. At the end of the day, how you do business in the hobby is up to you. Speaking as an international hobbyist, I won’t deny that it’s a bummer, but I tried to put those feelings aside while I collected this data (and yeah, I know I failed when it came to the handling fee business… we all have our weaknesses). I hope at the very least this was educational!
Special thanks go to my partner Tim, for doing the hard bits. I basically flung the numbers at him and said “I want to say this” and “I want to write that” and “how do I get these percentages?” and he drew up the tables for me (and did the maths). I’m not crediting him as a co-author, though, because he already has publications to his name and I don’t, so there.