Seller Experience - The Secret "How To's" of eBay Shipping
I've seen a few discussions online about which service to use when shipping eBay items. There are a few out there such as viparcel.com and usps.com and there are others also. I've been selling on eBay for over 6 years now and regularly send 20-40 items out every day.
I have tried several postage services and have found something that works very well for me and I'm going to share with you my secret for the fastest, cheapest way to ship that takes the least amount of time. From start to finish you can have a shipping label printed out in under a minute!
When first starting out selling on eBay most people will do what they would normally do to send out a package: box it up and take it to the post office, USPS Store, or another carrier location.
This is what I did when I first started selling. Once or twice a week I would take all my items to the post office and spend 30 minutes getting them all shipped out. Pretty soon I got tired of making these trips and dreaded the frequent long lines. This led me to check out online shipping services.
USPS.com was the first online shipping fulfillment service I used. There are several like this. There is a monthly fee and sometimes a startup fee and you usually need to download software, purchase credits upfront or buy labels to print onto. It works pretty good and some of these even have links to get your items picked from your home.
The Monday of Thanksgiving week, I set my personal best record for the number of items shipped out in a single day. On that day we shipped out over 50 items without making a single trip to the post office! Since most of my items earn me $20 or more I made a lot of money that day.
This is how I did it. When you receive a PayPal payment you get an email from PayPal with all the transaction details. In the top right quadrant of this email with be a transaction number that is a hyperlink to PayPal. When you click on that link it will take you to a page on PayPal that shows all the details about the transaction. At the bottom of the page there is a link that says "Print a Shipping Label." When you click on that link you'll be directed to a page where you can choose to ship USPS or UPS.
There are a few awesome things about this. The first is you don't have to enter any shipping info into the system because PayPal already has that information. This service if free through PayPal so you're charged the same price you would pay at the UPS Store or Post Office. There are no monthly fees or transaction fees.
Once you have picked the service you can print the shipping label directly from the website. The trick is not to make this too complicated. Print the shipping label onto normal white paper. There are excess details printed with this that you can either cut away from or just fold behind the label. Tape the label to the box with 2 inch packing tape and it's ready to go. I always tape over the whole label so if it gets wet the ink won't run.
UPS charges to pickup items so I ship almost all my items through USPS. They will pickup for free if you are on a normal postal route. To get them to pick up go to usps.com and open a free account. There will be a tab to schedule a pickup. Even if it's just one box they will come directly to your front door and take the items you want to ship. You can schedule a single pickup or schedule pickups several times a week and there's never any charge for this.
Posted on September 11, 2018
