Shipping Supplies?

You will inevitably need boxes, bubble wrap, 2" packing tape and all sorts of other supplies to ship your sold items. I recommend a designated confined workspace in your home where you can keep all these supplies all in the same area. You'll need scissors, a tape measure, some sort of scale and a printer. Any printer will do. Your existing laser or ink-jet printer will do.

In most cases you shouldn't have to pay for boxes, bubble wrap and other packing materials. Again, the idea is to keep your costs to the bone. Why pay extra for things when you don't have to?

You can get free cardboard boxes from almost anyplace under the sun. I recycle my boxes all the time, whenever possible. Same goes for packing supplies. If I order something off ebay and it comes wrapped up in bubble wrap or those foam peanuts, you'd better believe I'm saving them for future use myself. Why toss them when you can use them?

Some good sources for bubble wrap are department stores, furniture stores, Hallmark stores- pretty much any store that regularly receives shipments of wares to display for sale. They gotta come in to the store boxed up somehow, right? Hallmark typically gets a ton of it each week. Half of the stuff in a Hallmark store is glass, and you know they have to pad it with something. Walk in and ask to speak with the manager, and ask to take all his bubble wrap off his hands. Find out which days he had deliveries, and ask him to have his employees stuff all the bubble wrap in to a box and put your name on it.

Couldn't hurt to ask, could it?

You could always buy the stuff at WalMart or at places like UHaul or self-storage places, but only buy as a last resort. Of course, you could also use newspaper to pad items.

Ebay and USPS have teamed up to offer you FREE supplies. You can order free USPS/ebay boxes through ebay, and they will be delivered to your home. These only apply to boxes, and only to USPS Priority boxes. Ebay and USPS are pushing Priority heavily, and the free boxes can't be used for media mail, parcel post or obviously, UPS. They also cannot be turned inside-out and reused that way. They used to be- I did that all the time!

You'll need plenty of clear 2" packing tape. You won't need a huge amount just getting started, but you will, because your sales will continue to grow as you add more and more to your inventory. As your inventory increases, and as your feedback slowly climbs, buyers will begin to trust you more and more as a respectable seller worthy of their hard-earned money.

You will want to open up a UPS online account. It's easy to do at UPS.com. You'll be assigned an account number, which you will plug in to your paypal account. From there, with that UPS account, UPS will give you discounts on UPS postage generated through paypal. Paypal is where you will be generating some of your shipping labels, but, lately, more and more of my shipping labels have been generated straight from ebay itself.

UPS is good for shipping some things. They offer free insurance (meaning it's included in the price) for items valued up to $100. USPS makes you pay for all amounts of shipping coverage. Sometimes UPS is cheaper, sometimes the post office is cheaper. For items weighing 13 ounces or less, USPS First Class Parcel is about the cheapest there is. Parcel Post isn't much cheaper than Priority, but can take 3 - 4 days longer. Parcel Post is pretty much only good for heavier items where it's simply more economical than Priority, but it seems like UPS is always cheaper, for me at least, for UPS Ground.

Never take your items to the post office of to a UPS store to buy shipping. The rates are almost always cheaper online. It's as though they simply do not want to see you- ever- inside the post office or UPS lobby. They simply prefer that you print your postage at home.

One note of caution: it is VERY tempting to enter in a false weight when calculating postage at home. For example, a box that you know weighs 12 pounds, don't enter eight. If you enter eight, or any weight less than the true amount, and you are caught, here's what's going to happen: The post office or UPS is going to ship your package, alright, but they are going to hold the package at the destination office and send a note to your buyer: "Dear buyer: You have a package awaiting at your local post office with postage due. Please take time out of your incredibly busy day to swing by the post office, which is woefully inadequately-staffed, be prepared to wait in impossibly long lines, and pay the additional postage to receive your package. Don't forget to bring a valid ID with you. Have a nice day. Love, your post office."

Think your buyer is going to be happy? Think your buyer is going to want to give you good DSRs, or worse, a + feedback? Remember, buyers will give - feedback if the wind blows the wrong direction and messes up their hair. Don't give them any more reasons!

And last, but not least, ALWAYS PROVIDE INSURANCE ON EVERYTHING YOU SHIP. Sure, you might try to cut corners on a $10 item and think, what are the odds? Believe me, USPS, UPS and FedEx handle millions of packages a day. Do you think every single one arrives at its destination? Unbroken?

Click on this link for free USPS Priority boxes:  http://ebaysupplies.usps.com/usps   (you may need to copy & paste it in a new window)

These are free boxes, shipped free to your home. Keep in mind these are pretty much limited to USPS Priority mail. The post office really wants you to use nothing but Priority mail for your ebay items. And they want you to print out your labels at home.

One used to be able to rip the glued seam on these free ebay boxes, turn them inside out and tape them back up to use to ship via any other class (media mail, first class, parcel post), or even for use as UPS boxes, but the post office pretty much put an end to that by printing Priority Mail Only on the insides of the boxes, thus preventing this little trick.

Also, while browsing around in the ebay new seller section, I stumbled across this helpful link:   http://pages.ebay.com/sellerinformation/index.html

Ebay is constantly updating its website with new pages, new material, or new, revised information. As such, I am constantly finding new sources of information within ebay's website. As I find them, I'll post them in my posts for you all. But, don't think that I am the only one allowed to browse on ebay's site to explore. Spend an afternoon an plunge right in and do some exploring yourself. There are tons of helpful tidbits all over the place that you'll discover with a little digging.

My blog is simply an addendum to the ebay website- my little 2 cents worth of things I've learned above and beyond what the website will tell you. Things that can really only be learned through trial and error- lots of errors, lemme tell ya! I've already made all those errors, and I've learned from them. Now you can learn from those errors via my blog.