Category: Shipping

Get your items to buyers safely and on time. Learn how to calculate shipping rates, compare shipping options, deal with delays and more.

A Beginner Seller’s Guide to Return Shipping on eBay

Return requests are an evitable part of doing business on eBay. There are many reasons why a return may be necessary, such as a buyer making a mistake with a purchase or the item becoming damaged in transit. In most cases, a return involves the item being shipped back to the seller. This article explains…

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7 Tips to Improve Packing Efficiency in Your eBay Business

One of the most time consuming tasks of eBay selling is packaging items for shipping. Spending even 10-15 minutes packaging a single item can quickly add up to hours (and days) spent processing stock. Being a physical process, it can be hard to visualize how to speed up this aspect of eBay selling. Besides outsourcing,…

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How to Deal with Shipping Delays on eBay

However sophisticated and wide reaching our global mailing system is, occasional shipping delays are a fact of life. Weather, holidays, emergencies and, of course, global crises can severely interfere with the regular flow of mail. Packages on their way to international destinations can get stuck in customs for weeks and months without rhyme or reason….

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How to Save Money when Shipping Items: a New eBay Seller’s Guide

Shipping fees can be a costly surprise to new eBay sellers who may not be familiar with sending items through the mail. Depending on the size and method of sourcing items, shipping fees can be the most expensive part of listing and selling items for some eBay sellers. Keep reading to discover seven ways to…

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Using the Global Shipping Program As a Seller

The Global Shipping Program (GSP) must be one of the most controversial features of eBay. Our New Seller’s Guide to the GSP still receives plenty of attention and comments, even years after publishing. I thought it was about time we dug further into the Global Shipping Program debate. Let’s start at the beginning. Why sell…

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Packing Tips to Ensure Items Do Not Arrive Damaged

There are two principal reasons to take care when packaging and sending items to buyers. The first is that sellers are responsible for items until the buyer receives them. If an item is damaged during transit, the buyer has the right to request a refund based on the item not matching the description in the…

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Getting Shipping Rates Right

Listing an item on eBay isn’t only about providing great photos and an accurate description; the cost of shipping is also an important factor for interested buyers. Buyers hate getting ‘ripped off’ by extortionate postage costs. There are three main ways to communicate to the buyer how much shipping will cost for an item. Calculated…

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To Ship Free, or Not to Ship Free?

eBay actively encourages sellers to offer free shipping and handling on items via rating rewards, higher search placement and initiatives such as “Fast ‘N Free.” While these benefits are undeniable, providing free shipping is not necessarily advantageous to every eBay seller’s business as I will explore here. Free shipping = lower fees? One important point…

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Does eBay’s GSP Make International E-commerce Better for Buyers?

After publishing an article entitled Using eBay’s Global Shipping Program – a guide for new sellers I was very interested to read so many comments left by our readers. There were comments both praising and critical of eBay’s new Global Shipping Program (GSP). Those critical of the program were very strongly opposed to the new offering from the e-commerce giant. The eBay community…

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