Sweet little tip.
Must admit that I did use to do that, but I found a real lack of anything decent really being listed at a bargain price and even with ebay's traffic, I was getting better local deals on there.
There is always some idiot that doesn't want to go to the trouble of posting an item, and that often leads to low bids if the local market isn't hot that week.
Easy as to simply buy the item, re-list with a postage option and make margin of their ignorance in a lot of cases.
Never hurts to ask neither, I know some sellers get the poos when they get asked if they will ship at your expense if they have already listed with NO SHIPPING, but I've score plenty of excellent deals by asking.
Got a Baumix kitchen blender with all the attachments, only 6 months old at the time. It was listed as a local pick-up only and was in some small Western Australian town where I doubt if anyone local was even on ebay, apart from the seller themselves.
They started it at $5.00 no shipping. I made contact and asked if they would ship for the price of shipping, plus an extra $10.00 for their time.
Their reply was that they would be quite happy to do that, and it ended up that I was the only bidder. All up it cost me about 33.00 from memory and I took it out to a local tender centre auction, left it there for a week. Got heaps of bids, most around 100, but one just over 250.00, and sold it without doing a thing.