How to Ship on eBay: A Beginner’s Guide
When you’re just getting started, figuring out how to ship on eBay can be daunting. Small businesses like yours need to keep budgets small without sacrificing quality. But minimizing product damage is still important, especially when it comes to one-of-a-kind items or collectibles.
If you are using eBay to sell products, you are probably familiar with the cost of shipping. It doesn’t matter how large or small your business is, it can cost a lot to make sure your products arrive safely. There are many ways to ship your product, some more expensive than others. One way to really cut down costs is to do your shipping preparation from home. Shipping from home can seem intimidating and feel like unnecessary work, but there are benefits that far outweigh the extra time spent! To take advantage of the benefits of great shipping, and save money, consider the suggestions below.
Don’t Ship Everything the Same Way
A common shipping mistake is packaging and shipping every item as if it were the same thing. Everything you sell has a different weight and shape, and requires a different amount of protection to keep it safe. If you subscribe to the “one size fits all” mentality, you put your products and your seller rating at risk. Understanding how much protection your package needs and what kind of packaging you use will help you in many ways. You won’t waste packing materials on items that don’t need the protection, saving you money and keeping your stock of on-hand materials high. You will also see a decrease in broken items, increasing your seller rating and making it easier to capture repeat customers.
Choose the Right Packing Material
Let’s talk about air cushions. Air cushions can protect any type of product using any type of packing method, but they weight virtually nothing. That means your packages weigh less, and you pay less! They also come in different sizes and specialty options. Whatever kind of product you have, it can benefit from air cushions.
Cushions are also virtually hassleless for your customer. We have all received packages overflowing with void fill material. It’s hard to find your buried product, then hard to get rid of the bulky material. Unlike other packing alternatives, disposal of air cushions is easy and doesn’t take up an entire recyle bin! Once deflated, cushions take up just 1% of their original size. Less waste, more protection, and there’s no chance of papercuts!
Keep Weight in Mind
Air cushions’ superior protection can help you save money in more ways than just reducing damaged products. Many shippers are moving over to dimensional weight pricing over physical weight pricing. Dimensional (dim) weight is the estimated weight of a package calculated using its length, width, and height. The larger your package, the higher the dim weight. In these situations sending smaller packages will save you money. It all comes down to how condensed can you make your packaging. Smaller packages mean less space for protective material, so if you plan to take advantage of these savings make sure you use the best.
For traditional, physical weight shipping, take advantage of special circumstances. For example, did you know that a package weighing less than 16 ounces can be shipped first class? First class shipping is far less expensive than priority. If your products are light this is a great way to save!
Don’t Stress
Running a small business is hard work. Every day holds its challenges, but when it comes to shipping from home, you got this. All it takes is a little extra time, care, and knowledge. It’s easy to pass on packaging to someone else or some other carrier and leave it all up to them. We live in a world where we want everything done for us! But if you take the time to understand how to ship from home, you will save money and come out better for it.