Once again the news has carried a message that shopping online is faulted due to excessive shipping charges.

so........

when buying online - or from the various mailed catalogs - always be sure to examine your shipping charge before you buy.  Over time you will gain a feel for shipping charges to your home.  Till that day arrives for you it is quite important that you examine a charge as best your able.  The more easy way on EBAY is for you to look at other sellers who are selling the same product your about to buy and discover what they charge in comparison.  It can become a complex and involved study if you want it to.

We refer to the shipping company as the 'carrier' and there is more than one carrier.  USPS (united states postal service) UPS (united parcel service and FEDEX (federal express) are possibly your three most commonly known and used carriers.  We go way back to the founders of UPS.  Have known of and have used the UPS service a good deal.  Since we were affiliated with UPS we had a tendency to ignore FEDEX a long while.  By the by FEDEX began to compete with UPS and became a fine company in their own right.  All the while, of course, USPS existed and was used by the majority of people spanning a good many years now.  Today we use USPS for the great majority of our mailings.  USPS works for us logistically and they also work for our buyers in that USPS happens to offer the more fair rates in our case.

Each of these carriers has mailing classes.  As you know a package can be delivered overnight or, in the case of media mail, could take 30 or more days to reach its destination.  Each class of mail has its own rates.  The rate is typically by the ounce or by the pound or both.  Its costs you less to mail an envelope with a business report in it than it would cost to mail a box of books from Portland Oregon to New York City.  Carriers also offer other unique services or not.  Since they differ to one degree or another while we enjoy use of USPS another person (seller) may prefer UPS and another person FEDEX.  We use UPS whenever we need to mail a large box or particularly so a large box of unique shape.....such as a box which contains a large oil painting.  USPS can not mail large unique boxes nor will they accept boxes of heavy weight........and so forth.  Our use of USPS and our relationship with local USPS employees is a good experience to date.  We have shipped thousands of orders and had no troubles at all.  Still other sellers will tell you they had nothing but troubles with any particular carrier and many people enjoy picking on USPS in particular it seems.  Our experience, as mentioned, has been very good.  We respect the local USPS employees and we see they do indeed put in a days work each and every day.  On the other hand they repsect us since they have worked with us a long while now and they know we are quite competent in all that we do that could possibly be of concern to them.  So we ignore our contract with UPS and use USPS much of the time.  (Its the best service for our buyers and so it is best for us)

Before this conversation turns into a book i would heartily suggest that you click on USPS and read through their many pages of what shipping is all about.  Become familiar with the site enough to know how to properly evaluate a fair charge from an overcharge.  They have a briefing you can click on from their home page which will help you into their general introduction and general shipping knowledge.

Our shipping would always be a bit more than another person (possibly) because of several factors.  One we do not hide charges.  Two we include delivery confirmations on all of our orders.  Three we like to ship priority class mail (2 days travel time) because the greater majority of our buyers prefer priority mail class over parcel post.  

On the other hand........We take shipping deposits from the buyers and after their order ships we come back and look at the charges.  Where we discover an overcharge took place we typically refund that amount back to the buyers paypal account and email the buyer of this.  This would be particularly true of an overseas buyer.  You must appreciate that when we list an ad we have no idea who is going to buy the item.  Possibly a buyer from within the states and equally possible it could be a buyer outside the USA.  We found, after several programs of trial and error, that its most easy for us to respond to a shipping correction after we have actually shipped.

There is what is called flat rate shipping.  This is where no matter where you are everyone pays the very same shipping charge.  Watch out for this type of service.  You must examine flat rate shipping before you agree to buy from a seller who uses it.  The fact that i am selling a pencil for ten bucks to Joey who lives ten miles down the road and am making use of flat rate shipping - with a charge of $20.00 to mail Joey the pencil..........the charge actually takes into consideration that Sally, who lives in Sweden, may buy one and the cost would be $20.00 to mail it to her........so Joey, ten miles down the road, just got burned big time.  Flat rate.  Since i am a seller knowing Sally is going to buy as many pencils as Joey and I am in a hurry about setting up the ads on these pencils so I just slam a flat rate on everyone of $20 and that way no matter where the person lives the seller is covered...........not the buyer.

In our case we always have and always will focus on destination specific charges.  Our buyers pay what they should pay as appropriate.  No more.  No less.  Very fair.  Or, if we used flat rate, which we have at times, you will see where its only dedicated to a certain area.  For example a flat of $5 for the pencil within the USA and then calculated charges outside the USA depending on final destination.  Very fair.   

Buyers need to know something about all of this in order to be competent when they examine a shipping charge.  It is important to be sure you compare apples to apples and not attempt to compare apples to oranges as they say.  If a ship charge includes rush mail (priority mail) with a delivery confirmation and insurance then it is of course going to be a more significant charge than a seller who simply utilizes parcel post with no delivery confirmation and no insurance.  For a buyer to determine both charges are the ''same'' would be folly.  Quite ignorant actually.

The news report says that online shipping charges are excessive.  That may be the truth.  That may be a lie.  It depends on which seller or which company the reporter looked at and the amount of research that went into the report.  We suspect that this reporter failed to take a look at the big picture and just wanted to stir up some chatter.  The problem is that such reporters as this do us all an injustice by reporting incorrect information or intentional misinformation.  There are sellers who overcharge.  Its true.  Very few.  They do this to make up for a bad sale where noone bids on the item and someone walks off with their item at a very low price.  The excessive mail charge attempts to retrieve a part of the sellers loss. Then there are sellers who simply inflate the charge, whether they sell an item at a fair to profitable price or not, to gleen every last cent they can out of the buyer.  Luckily most online sellers are fair and honest.  The trick then, for you, is to avoid those sellers who are crooks.  This is best done by examing the product, the price, and the shipping before you buy anything from any seller at all.  And finally you also want to know if you can return the product if you do not like it or it arrives and proves to be ''not as described".  And, if you do return the product - who pays for the return shipping?  You or the seller?  If you return a product which was improperly described to the point of a scam then should the seller refund ALL of your original charges including shipping or not?  We say the seller should refund you IN FULL including any and all shipping charges.  Keep this in mind.  Its YOUR hard earned money we are dealing with here - and you deserve fair and honest treatment by all sellers at all times.  They play fair.  You play fair.  Done deal.

Some several years ago EBAY made a hearty effort to weed out sellers who abused shipping charges.  Certain sellers were invited to participate in this effort.  (Including us.)  We agreed and we did indeed work with EBAY to help correct shipping abuse.  In short order we also found ourselves working with better than 25 sellers on ebay who approached us about packaging, shipping, fair charges, and so forth.  Despite all the effort and interest we are disappointed to discover there are still a few sellers on ebay who will advantage you if they possibly can.  Watch out for this.  Be alert for this.  If we can all work together we can indeed put an end to this type of seller quickly.  If they do not sell anything they will either change their bad habits to better ones or they will go bust and leave EBAY.  We do not care which happens.  We simply care to stop them in their tracks from taking advantage of people.

Never refrain from asking questions.  As one of my teachers in high school used to like to remark....the only stupid question is the question you were afraid to ask........or something like that.  Its true.  So always feel free to ask questions.  If the seller avoids you or simply ignores you then you need to imagine there is a reason and that reason will likely not work to your best interests.

In the meantime, by all means, use the online market to shop as best you can.  You save time, gasoline expense, wear and tear on the car, parking expense, and so forth.  The trade off being a shipping charge.

You do not have to leave your home.  You can stay indoors, safe warm and comfortable, take your time, and shop online with great convenience and opportunity.

You can shop for yourself or you can shop a birthday present for a family member. 

shopping online is a great tool.  Its also a great way to cover many sellers (stores) in a hurry.  The reward being your ability to get what you want and get it at a very fine price.  Imagine having to drive from one shopping mall to the next, one store to the next, and having spent a full day driving around looking for a yellow silk scarf with white polka dots you fail.  What did such a day as this cost you in time and money?  Yet you could have gone online and found what you were looking for, at a fair price, in oh lets say all of five minutes and been done with it by shopping online.  Your time is quite important to you.  Its worth it to you to make good use of your time.  Spending your day on doing things that work for you and not against you.  Finding ways to save your time and save your money will always work for you!!

And so you pay a shipping charge.  Why not.  Nothing to it at all.  Look at the time and expenses you have saved by shopping online.  You paid for your computer.  Why not use it - alot.  Its a great tool.

Bear in mind nothing is free these days.  A seller who advertises free shipping needs to be examined.  Did they increase the price of the product?  Did they charge for something extra other than shipping such as packaging.  Some place in that ad you are most certainly paying for shipping!  Nothings free.  Wholesalers do not ship free to a seller.  A basic inexpensive watch (for example) is $10.00 on average from the wholesaler to the seller.  The seller has no say in this whatsoever and the charge includes insurance as appropriate.  Shipping an elaborate and expensive watch, say a Cartier, worth $30,000.00 retail each, will quite certainly arrive with various charges including signature required in the shipping charge from the wholesaler.  In some cases a very expensive watch may be HAND CARRIED by a courier from the wholesaler to the seller - and try to imagine the charge for that.  It stands to reason.  Its all pretty much common sense.  And some place in your ad while your told shipping is free - its not.  How can you stay in business at all without a profit?  Its impossible.  So lets understand that free shipping is a come on and stop kidding ourselves.  IF a wholesale supplier sent us a watch free of charge where they paid the shipping for us then we could turn around and ship to you free of charge - but we have never once discovered any manufacturer or wholesaler or distributor who is WILLING to absorb our shipping at their expense!!

Its ok to pay shipping.  Its appropriate for you to pay for shipping.  We all do.  The thing is - be alert and do not be gouged without justification.

Some person wrote one of these books about ebay for dumb people.  How to do things on ebay.  We read the book.  There were parts to it where the author was well versed, was telling the reader good things, then there were parts to the book which were a matter of debate and certainly the authors opinion was overwhelming....but then there were parts to this book which openly displayed a complete degree of absolute ignorance on the authors part.....and one of these places was the chapter on shipping.  Wow.  We would not recommend that book to anyone.  A total waste of your money.  Ebay is well presented.  All you will ever need to know about ebay as a buyer or seller is right there, well presented, on the site itself.  Do not go buying books about ebay.  Then, if something comes up which ebay does not seem to have explained well if at all - go to the ebay chat sites and discuss an issue or offer a question to those people.  They will be more than happy to help you out.