Mighty Bargain Hunter

Making money with an eBay Store, Part 7: Streamlining your shipping process

April 19th, 2008 | by mbhunter |

(This post is part of a series on Making Money with an eBay Store. The Introduction and table of contents to the series is here.)

Part 6 of this series on making money with eBay Storesshowed some of the things I do to streamline my listing process. The idea is to get as much merchandise up on eBay in the shortest amount of time as possible, because if your items sell for $215, it will be the same $215 whether you spent an hour listing the items or twenty hours. Listing the auctions is necessary, but the time spent is non-income-producing just by itself.

The same can be said for shipping. It’s essential to get the items to the customers quickly and in good condition, but it’s also important to spend a minimum amount of time on this as well. (Two of the four detailed feedback categories that buyers can leave for sellers are related to shipping: “How reasonable were the shipping charges?” and “How quickly was the item shipped?”) Locating the item, getting the packing slip, packaging it properly, setting up postage, and mailing it are also necessary activities (assuming you deliver real goods rather than electronic goods) but are by themselves non-income-producing activities.

Which shipper should you use? I don’t know, because it depends on what you want to sell. I use the United States Postal Service, so I’ll talk about what I do to use the USPS’s shipping services. You should look at what you are selling and investigate the USPS, Federal Express, and UPS to see which will give you the most bang for your buck. Shipping is an unavoidable cost of selling real goods through eBay, so keeping the shipping costs as low as possible makes your items more competitive in the eBay marketplace, and therefore helps your bottom line.

The good news is that each of the big three, more or less, have good tools and options to help you make shipping easy on yourself. For example, the USPS:

• Has packing materials available free of charge for its Priority and Express services — and they’ll deliver them to you for free, too
• Allows purchase and printing of postage online, without any special equipment necessary, through its Click-N-Ship® service
• Has pickup services available for higher-volume shippers
• Has online tracking available, which is included with certain parts of the Click-N-Ship service

The other carriers have their own suite of services similar to this flavor. So look at what you are selling and choose the service (or services) that will ship your items with the least fuss and with the least expense.

Streamlining your shipping involves two major areas: having the right materials on hand, and having a good procedure working.

What shipping materials are good to have on hand? You may not need all of these things but here’s what I use:

• Packing tape with a dispenser. I got a heavy duty packing tape dispenser at a going-out-of-business sale for $5; the eBay link has a few for about $10 – $15. Some of the flat-rate USPS boxes I use do not have adhesive strips on them, so I need to tape those myself. We get packing tape by the dozen rolls at Costco.
• Boxes and envelopes. I use USPS Priority Mail flat-rate boxes and envelopes. They’re free, and the post office will deliver them to me for free. I can charge my customers a consistent rate for postage. What’s even nicer now is that these materials can be used for international shipping, too. (The rates are different, though.) Obviously I have to use the Priority Mail service to ship them, but that’s my cheapest option for magazines. (I can’t send them by Media Mail or by Bound Printed Matter rate. The postal regulations don’t allow it.) I have enough on hand that I won’t run out anytime soon.
• Self-adhesive laser printer shipping labels. Big blank stickers. I originally used Click-N-Ship by printing the labels on regular paper and then taping them to the box. It really isn’t that much cheaper when you include the tape, and it’s a bit of a pain in the neck because I can’t tape over the barcode on the label. The shipping labels are a lot easier, and worth the extra few cents apiece. There’s a little bit of a learning process to getting the labels to work, getting the printer not to give you an error each time you use a non-letter-size label, but not having to mess with the tape is worth it.
• Postal scale. With Click-N-Ship I need to enter a weight for the item I want to ship. (Even though the service is a flat-rate service — same price regardless of the weight — I’m sure they need accurate weight for other reasons.) I got a postal scale off of eBay and it works just fine.
• Packing material. Bubble wrap, newspaper, shredded paper, Styrofoam peanuts, whatever. This doesn’t necessarily have to be bought. If you buy a strip shredder, shred lengthwise, and then make it a point to mix up the strips of paper well, then there should be no danger of one particular buyer ever being able to piece together anything about you or anyone else from the packing material.

What’s the magic process for shipping 100 items in ten seconds? Well, it’s won’t be quite that easy, and your process will likely be different than mine because you’ll be selling different things. The main trick to remember is to improve the process over time. Look for more efficient ways to do what needs to be done: pack the right item, pack the item carefully, ship it quickly, and track it effectively both for delivery and in your books.

Here is the extent of my process as it is:

• Once something is bought, I invoice the customer if they haven’t paid or if they’ve bought multiple items. I’ll combine shipping to save them money if I can. EBay makes it pretty straightforward to invoice once for multiple purchases. They group the purchases from one person in My eBay -> Sold. Once on the invoice screen, the shipping will likely be outrageous at this point, because it will just add up your shipping charges from each individual auction. I usually just remove that shipping option and add a new one that reflects how I will actually ship the item (one flat-rate box rather than six flat-rate envelopes).
• After I’m paid, I log into PayPal (which is how things are purchased more than 95% of the time with me), find the transaction, click on “Details,” then scroll to the bottom and click “Print Packing Slip.” Then I print two copies: one for the customer, and one for me. Then I go to USPS.gov and log into my account for Click-N-Ship. I enter the appropriate information, including the ZIP code where I’ll be sending from, which usually is different from my home’s ZIP code. (This is a quirk in the Click-N-Ship system. The particular post office I send it from won’t get credited if the ZIP code is wrong on the package. Why the system can’t figure out where the package was sent from, I don’t understand.) Once all of the labels are ready, I change the page size on my printer from “letter” to “executive,” print the labels, and change the setting back.
• This is important! Before sealing up the package and affixing the paid postage label on the package, I double-check that I’m sending the customer what he or she ordered! All the efficiency in the world is worthless if I send the wrong item! This is especially important with my stuff, because I usually don’t have another. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
• Now that I have my packing slip and my label receipt, I staple them together for my records and this has just about everything I need to keep track of the sale.
• I ship the item(s) the next day if I can. This works against efficiency (it would be nice if I only shipped one day a week!) but I’m rated by buyers on how quickly I get their items to them. (Right now I have a 4.9 out of 5.0 for shipping time.) Usually I don’t have to wait long in the post office, even if there’s a line, because the employees there know I use Click-N-Ship most of the time and see me coming, so they just take my packages even if they’re helping someone else, and I’m off to the races.
• I let the buyer(s) know that stuff is on the way, and ask them to let me know when it arrives. I have an e-mail template in My eBay that has all of this ready to go. The more communication, the better. (Communication is another detailed seller rating!)

Again, your process might be a bit different, but the point is to have a process and to work actively at making it better.

I hope that you’re enjoying this series! What would you like to hear about next? Feel free to suggest topics in the comments or by contacting me.