A used Antminer S19 travels in a 22 × 12 × 17-inch carton and weighs 35 lb packed. That is a parcel, not freight, and the median seller charges $50 to move it. So the first thing to know about how to ship heavy equipment is that most of it is not heavy enough to be freight — 30 to 90 lb, one box, one label. Four machines on a pallet is a different job, with a different price, a different carrier and a different set of ways to lose money.
What follows is what that costs, measured from 171 completed sales rather than asserted, plus the fee arithmetic on the shipping you collect, which is the part that catches people. It sits under our guide to selling bitcoin miners on eBay; the machines are the worked example because they are what we ship most, but the lines below are the same for a PowerEdge, a VFD or a baseband unit.
How to ship heavy equipment: where parcel stops, and freight starts
Three ceilings decide everything else. USPS stops at 70 lb (usps.com, checked 11 August 2026). UPS and FedEx stop at 150 lb per package. Above that you are in freight, which is eBay’s own framing — its seller centre describes freight as the route for items small-package carriers won’t take, and gives you two ways to price it: a flat-rate freight charge, or a freight rate table covering up to 100 buyer regions.
Here is where the machines actually fall, from Bitmain’s own specification pages, checked on 11 August 2026. Net weight is the machine; gross weight is what the carrier puts on the scale.
| Model | Net | Gross (shipping weight) | Carton |
|---|---|---|---|
| Antminer S19 | 14.2 kg / 31.3 lb | 16 kg / 35.3 lb | 570 × 316 × 430 mm |
| Antminer S19 Pro | 13.2 kg / 29.1 lb | 15.2 kg / 33.5 lb | 570 × 316 × 430 mm |
| Antminer S19K Pro | 12.85 kg / 28.3 lb | 14.5 kg / 32.0 lb | 570 × 316 × 430 mm |
| Antminer S21 | 15.4 kg / 34.0 lb | 17.2 kg / 37.9 lb | 570 × 316 × 430 mm |
| Antminer S21 Pro | 20 kg / 44.1 lb | 22 kg / 48.5 lb | 680 × 390 × 450 mm |
Not one of them is freight. A single machine is a parcel every time, and the seller who quotes a pallet price for one unit has priced themselves out of the listing. The line moves at three or four units, and it moves for the S21 Pro sooner than for the rest — at 48.5 lb it is nearly half again the weight of an S19K Pro in a carton 55% bigger by volume.
Two practical notes that cost real money. Measure the box, not the machine. These cartons are mostly air by carrier standards, and dimensional weight can bill you for the volume rather than the mass — quote a flat rate off the machine’s weight and you will eat the difference on every zone-8 sale. And a hydro unit is not an air unit: the S19 and S21 hydro variants carry coolant plumbing and land in a heavier, more fragile bracket than the tables above.
What sellers actually charge to move one
Every article on this subject asserts what shipping “should” cost. Our sold-comp store records what was charged on the listing, so here is the market’s own answer. The method: up to 500 completed rows per query, keep only titles naming a whole machine, drop components, accessories and multi-unit lots, drop anything under $100 as a mislabelled part. The script is re-runnable and the counts below are its output, not a hand-picked sample.
| Query | Single machines kept | Median sold | Shipped free | Median charge, when charged | Middle half | Charge as % of price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
antminer s19 |
171 | $349.00 | 27% | $50.00 | $40.00–$52.41 | 14.3% |
antminer s21 |
117 | $1,400.00 | 33% | $50.00 | $50.00–$100.00 | 5.0% |
asic miner |
152 | $308.00 | 27% | $50.00 | $35.00–$50.00 | 14.5% |
The charge barely moves with the value of the machine, because the box doesn’t. Fifty dollars is the median on a $349 S19 and on a $1,400 S21 alike — which is 14% of one sale and 5% of the other. That single fact should change how you price the cheap end: on a sub-$400 machine, shipping is the second-largest line item after the machine itself, and it deserves the same attention you give the $/TH the hashrate is worth.
We measured the same field two weeks earlier on a narrower set — S19 95TH singles at a $150 median, where the median charge was $30.53 and 87% of sellers passed it to the buyer. Read the two together and the pattern gets sharper rather than weaker: about $30 on a $150 machine, $50 on a $349 one, $50 on a $1,400 one. The box does not care what is inside it.
The spread is wide and it is not all zone differences — $10.00 to $210.00 on the S19 set. The low end is sellers under-quoting a flat rate; the high end is mostly hydro units and long zones.
Two honest limits on the free-shipping figure. A $0.00 shipping row means the buyer paid nothing at checkout, which also catches local pickup and the freight-quoted-after-sale listings, so read 27% as an upper bound on true free shipping. And 500 rows per query is a cap, not a census — the store holds 1,743 rows matching antminer s19. Sold data is dirty in the ways we set out in how to see sold items on eBay; the filters above exist because of it.
eBay charges its percentage on the shipping you collect
From eBay’s own fee page, read on 11 August 2026: “The total amount of the sale includes the item price, any handling charges, any shipping costs collected from the buyer…, sales tax, and any other applicable fees.” The final value fee for most categories is 13.6% up to $7,500, plus a $0.40 per-order fee on orders over $10.
So take a PowerFlex 525-class drive that sells for $900 and costs $85 to move. Three ways to write the same listing:
| How you list it | Buyer pays | eBay takes | Carrier takes | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $900 item + $85 shipping | $985.00 | $134.36 | $85.00 | $765.64 |
| $985 item, free shipping | $985.00 | $134.36 | $85.00 | $765.64 |
| $900 item, free shipping | $900.00 | $122.80 | $85.00 | $692.20 |
Free shipping is fee-neutral if you put the freight in the price, and costs you $73.44 if you don’t. Not $85 — $73.44, because eBay’s 13.6% cut of the $85 you didn’t collect is $11.56 you also didn’t pay. That is the whole of the free-shipping question, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. What free shipping buys you is a filter and a headline number; what it costs is the freight, less eBay’s share of it.
Miners are a different rate — eBay files them under Coins & Paper Money at 13.25% — and the end-to-end version of that arithmetic, including the $7,500 threshold and the per-order fee across a multi-unit sale, is worked in selling ASIC miners in lots. No fee page should print one sitewide percentage; the rate depends on where the listing sits.
The heavy-equipment fee carve-out most sellers never see
On the same fee page, a handful of Business & Industrial categories are priced completely differently: Heavy Equipment Parts & Attachments > Heavy Equipment, Printing & Graphic Arts > Commercial Printing Presses and Restaurant & Food Service > Food Trucks, Trailers & Carts carry a $20 insertion fee and a final value fee of 3% up to $15,000, then 0.5% above it.
Run the same $985 sale through that and eBay takes $29.55 plus $0.40 plus the $20 insertion — $49.95 against $134.36. You keep $84.41 more, which is roughly the freight bill. If you sell genuine machinery, that carve-out is worth more than any listing tactic on this site.
The obvious temptation is the obvious mistake. The category has to actually be the category. A VFD or a servo drive is not heavy equipment, eBay recategorises listings that are filed in the wrong place, and a misfiled listing loses the buyers who filter by category — you cannot both hide from the fee and be found by the search that matters.
Packing, and what actually arrives broken
Miners fail in transit at the fan and at the board, in that order. The original Bitmain carton with its moulded end caps is the right inner box and the wrong outer box — it was designed to travel on a pallet inside a bigger shipment, not to be thrown alone into a hub. Double-box it: original carton, 2 in of foam or bubble on all six faces, outer box rated for the weight. Tape the fan guards so the blades cannot spin free against their bearings. If the machine travels with a separate APW-series supply, box it on its own rather than loose beside the chassis — it is dense, it is cornered, and in the same carton it becomes a hammer. Bitmain’s published weights above already include the PSU, so a machine shipping without one is lighter than the spec sheet and the listing should say so.
Industrial gear has its own version of the same rule. A teach pendant travels with its cable coiled and tied, never wrapped around the body under tension. Drives and PLCs go in anti-static bags with the terminal covers on. Anything with a display goes face-in against foam, because the screen is the one part that cannot be sourced separately.
When eBay is the wrong place for it
Say it plainly: if the item needs a forklift at both ends, a rigger, or a liftgate the buyer has not agreed to, eBay is a poor fit and a freight broker or a machinery dealer is a better one. The failure mode is not the shipping cost, it is the delivery — a residential buyer with a pallet on the kerb and no way to move it refuses delivery, and a refused freight delivery costs you the outbound leg, the return leg and the sale.
Below that line eBay is very good. The $200–$3,000 uncatalogued box — a drive, a server, a miner, a spare module — ships as a parcel, sells to a buyer who knows exactly what the part number means, and never needs a rigger. That band is most of the market and nearly all of our own sales. If you would rather not price the item and its fees by hand every time, ING Listing Engine does it against 864,000 completed sales on your own Windows machine, free during the beta. It will not pack the box for you.
Common questions
How much does it cost to ship an Antminer S19?
Across 171 completed single-machine sales in our store, the median seller charged $50.00, with the middle half between $40.00 and $52.41 and a full range of $10.00 to $210.00. Twenty-seven per cent charged nothing, which usually means the freight was built into the price.
How much does an Antminer weigh?
Packed, from Bitmain’s own specifications: S19 35.3 lb, S19 Pro 33.5 lb, S19K Pro 32.0 lb, S21 37.9 lb, S21 Pro 48.5 lb. The bare machine is roughly 2 kg lighter in each case. All of them ship as parcels rather than freight.
At what weight does eBay shipping become freight?
When a small-package carrier will no longer take it. USPS stops at 70 lb; UPS and FedEx stop at 150 lb per package. Above that you offer flat-rate freight or build a freight rate table, both of which eBay supports in the listing flow.
Does eBay charge fees on shipping?
Yes. eBay’s final value fee is calculated on the total amount of the sale, and eBay’s own fee page states that this includes shipping collected from the buyer. At the 13.6% general rate, every $85 of shipping you collect carries $11.56 of fee.
Is free shipping worth it on heavy items?
Only if you add the freight to the asking price. Done that way it is fee-neutral — identical net, to the cent. Done by simply ticking the box on an unchanged price, an $85 shipment costs you $73.44 of margin.
How do I ship four miners at once?
On a pallet, as LTL freight, with the machines strapped and stretch-wrapped in their original cartons and the pallet’s footprint no smaller than the stack. Whether the lot is worth selling as one listing at all is a separate question, and it is arithmetic: see selling ASIC miners in lots. The buyer’s side of the same job — what to check as the pallet comes off the truck, and how to bring the machines up without tripping the breaker — is receiving a used miner lot.
Filed under Reselling Hardware · Tagged ASIC miners, Sold comps, Fees & margin · Browse all guides by topic