Gem’s Shipping Secrets Guide.

My husband and I have been buying and selling in eBay for the past four years. Six months ago we decided to open our own eBay store. We decided to offer digital postal scales, shipping supplies and informational products to buyers. Through experience, over these past few years, we learned through trial and error how to take advantage of the United States Postal Service available shipping services.

This Guide has been created to help people like you to efficiently ship items from eBay to your valued clients. If you are reading this, you have already taken an important step to successful, professional and reliable shipping transactions. First, make sure that you get a reliable digital scale since it is important to accurately weigh the items that need to be shipped. Keep in mind that depending on the capacity of the scale will be its accuracy. Thus, the higher the scale’s capacity the lower it’s accuracy. Second, in order to send items you need to obtain the shipping supplies necessary for packing the things in a professional looking manner. A couple of good companies for this are USPS and FedEx.

The USPS offers shipping boxes in several different sizes. They also provide you with envelopes of different sizes and small shipping labels. These are free of charge and the best part is that they are delivered to your front door. That is what I call convenience! All you have to do is sign up and they will happily ship you all the supplies you need.

Click Here To Visit eBay's Shipping Center.  Here you will find the link to order free shipping supplies delivered to your door.

Make sure to watch the video on HOW TO PRINT USPS LABELS on the eBay Shipping Center for the USPS. It will show you step by step how to take advantage of eBay and PayPal shipping services. No more having to manually input your customers address. Huge time saver!

eBay's Shipping Center USPS

In case the link is not working visit the USPS.com site and look for the Order Supplies Button. There you can order supplies for USPS Priority Mail delivered to your door free of charge.

Another nice thing about USPS is that they offer flat rate boxes in two different sizes. For a flat fee of $9.30 as of December 2008, (pricing is increasing on January 2009) items can be shipped anywhere in the U.S., including Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico. That fee even includes a Tracking number so your clients know their shipping progress.You can put as many things in the box as you can fit, weight does affect the shipping cost. After your items are packed, you can call the USPS or schedule your pick ups on line and have them pick up your boxes free of charge. That way, you do not have to go to the post office and wait in those long lines.

We do must of our business though the USPS. They are very helpful. They deliver everywhere in the US, including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. They are the only ones that deliver to PO Boxes. They do not charge extra for Residential deliver or Saturday delivery. Plus their Flat Rate boxes can be a huge money savers if you are shipping heavy items to places far away.

UPS Shipping services are integrated well with PayPal shipping services. If you are shipping heavy bulky items, UPS will be a much better company. We are sure they are a great company. We just had a better experience with FedEx.

FedEx will also send you shipping boxes and other supplies free of charge. The best part about this company is that they have the best self-stick shipping labels. They work perfectly with eBay, PayPal, USPS.com, Stamps.com shipping services, etc. In order to get the free shipping labels from FedEx you have to sign up with them and open an account. They will ask you for your credit or debit card. You will not be charged for any of the supplies. The labels are called FedEx Laser Labels item # 146525. If you need help opening your free account or ordering free supplies just call at 1.800.463.3339. They are very helpful.

You can sign up for free at FedEx.com

You have the option of using your shipping company of choice. We prefer eBay and PayPal shipping services. After you get paid for the item sold, you have the option of printing your shipping label. If you decide to print the shipping label, you can also input the items weight and what service you want to use. When you are done with PayPal, it will show you how much shipping costs, if you decide it is the right amount, PayPal will go ahead and help you print the shipping label. The cost of shipping will come out of your PayPal account. The FedEx shipping labels mentioned work perfectly with this service. You always have the option of using plain paper to print the labels, but self-stick shipping labels are very convenient.

We have also learned that for larger boxes, FedEx, UPS and DHL have better shipping deals. We prefer FedEx shipping services over the other companies, one of the many reasons is their superb customer service. We have not done much business with UPS or DHL companies because most of our items for sale weigh 6 lbs. or less. In the future, our newsletters, we will further discuss all of the shipping services available from these companies.

At the beginning, we learned many useful tips from the USPS clerks; they are a good source of useful information. Thanks to them I learned about the flat rate shipping boxes and how much money I can save by using them.

As we mentioned, weight is used to calculate shipping costs. Another factor that needs to be taken under consideration is the postal zone where your customer resides, since the higher the zone number the more expensive it is to ship items. Let us explain, we live in California which is zone 1 and we want to ship to New York which is zone 8. The cost of the shipping for a 2 lbs item using Priority Mail would be $6.05. On the other hand, if the 2 lbs item was to be shipped to zone 3, the cost would only be $4.20. To further explain the postal zones, I included a printout of the Postal Zone Chart.

Please do a quick search at USPS.com for the Postal Zone Chart

In our case, every scale that we ship includes the USPS shipping fees printout under the lid of the scale. You can download the same information here if you wish to print it out your self.

You can Buy one of our Postal Scales or Shipping Supplies from our eBay Store HERE .

Availability update, the Flat Rate boxes are such a success that the USPS just started offering a new Bigger size Flat Rate box. It measures 12" x 12" x 5.5" compared to 11" x 8.5" x 5.5" of the original Flat rate.

We are happy to answer any shipping question through our eBay contact us messaging system. 

Please keep us in mind when looking for shipping supplies.

We look forward to the opportunity to serve you.

Gem & Al

SolutionsGem