Selling on eBay does involve shipping, and for some, this is laborious or boring, but for many shipping nerds, it’s fun. You may want to consider experimenting with this. You want to do a good job, since a shoddy shopping job kills the sale, and it can affect how people buy from you. Here, we’ll highlight a few of the key ways to ensure that you get the shipping done better, and easier too.
First, don’t overstuff the flat rate mailers. This is not a good idea, and if you can fit it, it’ll ship, but never crowd these, since they can burst open when they’re overstuffed. Use sound judgment when placing the items into there. You can get these for free on the USPS website, and the padded ones can be used for clothing and smaller, non-breakable items. Even if they’re padded though, you should never ship a fragile item into there.
Next, don’t’ wrap packages in brown paper. This isn’t good, especially since this can get ripped off in the machines, and that just ruins your addresses. Always affect the shipping label to your packages, so it doesn’t come off during shipping.
Finally, never use alcohol or beer boxes.
To ship, there are a few hacks that you can do. bubble wrap, packing peanuts, and the like all cost money, but there are inexpensive alternatives in order to ship your items in a secure fashion so you’re not having to pay the high cost of shipping different items.
First, consider pool noodles. They are great for cushioning since they can provide a decent amount of cushion around the different areas. This can be great for framed items, needlework, or any picture frames. You can eve chop these up as a cheap version of packing peanuts
Egg cartons are good for cushioning items that tend to break. You can put them along the bottom, add the breakable item to the middle, and then add more egg cartons. This is great because it keeps items from moving about. They’re worth getting, and pretty strong too.
Black trash bags are great for some items too. You can wrap rugs, bedding, and other home décor that isn’t breakable. You should make sure that the edges are taped securely so that it doesn’t get caught when you’re having them put through the processing machine.
Finally, make sure that you’re using eBay’s workflow to help ship your items. The tracking is updated, and from this, the customer will know the progress of their package within transit, and sometimes, if you use this system, it’ll give you a nice little shipping discount, which is definitely not a bad thing in most cases, and helps along the bottom line.
When it comes to shipping stuff off eBay, you should definitely consider some of the different aspects of this, and work to improve on this as well. When you’re talking about shipping, giving someone more safety and comfort rather than less will benefit them, so always make sure you err on the side of a little more packing here and there, since it’ll help in those cases where you feel like you don’t have enough packaging, and packing elements, but you don’t know how to effectively create that for your item.