Pinball Haus from Brisbane will have you covered with anything mate, Pinball spare parts and RTBB. Look them up.
Cheers

Shipping parts from the USA is always expensive, minimum will always be $30 - $40

That is pretty standard cost and reasonable.

What drop targets are you after out of interest?

Does the seller offer to ship via DHL? Here in America we were able to order small packages from Pinball Rescue in Australia via DHL for a flat $34 USD air mail rate.

Ask the seller if they can ship in a flat rate usps priority air mail box.

I’ve heard that shipping from Canada to Australia is cheaper than from US to Australia. Maybe you can have the parts shipped to a friend in Canada and then air mailed to you.

Maybe check out a post forwarder from US to Aus.

https://www.myus.com/welcome/australia/?aid=1000721&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign={campaign}&utm_content={adgroup}&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIuaPI_PPT-gIVQ5NmAh27rgOFEAAYASAAEgKoo_D_BwE

Small stores probably use retail pricing. To get the bulk pricing you have to be a merchant that ships a lot of items.

USPS rates are the cheapest of the commonly used carriers. All carriers are subject to lost or delayed packages. I believe that favoring one carrier over another is superstition. I've had issues with all the carriers.

You can use the USPS website to see what would be an expected ballpark figure for shipping. For example, 2lbs from US to AU (https://postcalc.usps.com/Calculator/MailServices?country=10013&ccode=AU&m=6&p=2&o=0) shows a range from $31 (First-Class Package International) to $43 (Priority Mail International Small Flat Rate Box) to $64 (Priority Mail International - use your own box) to $82 (Priority Mail Express International). I have shipped bigger and heavier packages and the price goes up a little bit more.

For the bigger packages I have walked into the UPS and FedEx Stores and been given rates of $200 for the one package.

Granted that the time I went for a quote from UPS or FedEx was during the height of the pandemic when all the airlines except United Airlines ceased passenger traffic across the Pacific Ocean. Some freight carriers were still operating. Some commercial airlines operated freight only flights. There was limited capacity across the Pacific Ocean at that time. Now that borders are effectively wide open again, the commercial carriers have restarted their services. There is now plenty of freight capacity. This morning I saw quite a number of flights across the Pacific Ocean.

• LAX-SYD (2 Qantas flights)
• LAX-SYD (1 Delta flight)
• LAX-SYD (1 United flight)
• LAX-BNE (1 Qantas flight)
• SFO-SYD (1 United flight)
• SFO-MEL (1 United flight)
• DFW-SYD (1 Qantas flight)

I'm not seeing the problem.
I get that your hoping for inexpensive shipping. But the vendor it probably just passing the actual cost of shipping to you.
International shipping will never be a "flat rate". What Dumbass said more elegantly.

Basically; the best thing for you to do is to arrange a "group buy" with others in your country and share the shipping costs with other people.

agree with DumbAss & Zitt - sounds like passing on actual postage

I do it with the mods I send overseas and at times takes time - flat rate probably costs more as they would round up.

alternative use this site - Pinball Search to find the parts maybe from a cheaper location - did a search on drops

https://www.pinballsearch.com/#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=playboy%20drop%20targets