Getting the Cheapest Shipping
I have just started selling some items on
Ebay. We are cloth diapering our daughter (am hoping to write an article on that soon!) and we sold her small diapers to move up to the medium diapers. This was my first experience with shipping on
Ebay. I made a guess on the shipping (thankfully, I overestimated!), boxed everything up, took both the kids to the post office, and had an awful time waiting in line. Why? Well, my son decided to run around and befriend everyone, then he began holding himself and saying he needed to go to the potty, then my daughter started screaming because she was hungry, then my son started playing in the trash, then I turned around to yell at him, and then my postage stuck to the wrong place...Are you starting to get the picture? When I had to bring the box up, to have the poor lady correct my postage placement, she then asked me if I wanted this type of shipping or this type of shipping. Did I want this insurance or that type of insurance? I had no idea- heck, I just want you to ship the dang box quickly. I came out of there, with both kids screaming, vowing to never ever go to the post office again.
There has to be a better way than this...and guess what? There is! I found this great site called
RedRoller, that actually spits out exactly how much your shipping costs will be and compares them against each other. If you invest in a little postage scale (there were some on
Ebay for under ten bucks), you can just do your own shipping from home. I input everything into the
RedRoller site and it told me that I could ship my item for $6.60, to the listed destination. You can create an account, have it link to your
Ebay account, print your shipping label from your computer, and then just have the carrier pick it up from your home- how cool is that? The nice thing about it linking to
Ebay was that it automatically updated my
Ebay account and let the buyer know that the item was shipped. Total time spent to ship the package- about five minutes.
The best part for me was that I didn't have two screaming kids waiting in line with me and I knew I was getting the best deal that I could....you know me and a bargain!
Labels: Frugal, Reviews
18Comments:
"Thank YOU!"
Twins & 2
"I never knew about this! Thank you so much...I have a 2 year old devil dog boy and twins who are 3 months old. I have a full blown nightmare going to the post office. Great ideas!"
"I've been shipping with RedRoller for a few weeks now and it's awesome! You can't imagine the time I save shipping my Ebay auctions. I don't even have to type the address anymore, it just pulls it in right from my Ebay account. Now how cool is that?"
"Cant wait for international shipping, make way for the revolution"
"It's an awesome site. Great time saver for me who has little kids at home. Love it!"
"Hi,
Thanks for the great article. I have found a better tool to compare shipping rates, www.shippingsidekick.com which compares the rates of all 4 major US shippers on one screen. Redroller does not include UPS, a major player in the shipping game!
I hope this helps everyone find the cheapest shipping rates!
Darren"
"Thanks for the tip on shippingsidekick. I checked it out but I can't actually purchase/print shipping labels or request a pick up. Also, I'm not sure if those rates are accurate or not...they didn't match up with some of the carrier website rates. The rates on RedRoller.com are lower in some cases and I can print my labels and request an automatic pick up, all for free. Why would I pay $14.95 a month for shippingsidekick? Plus RedRoller's eBay integration works great."
"Red Roller doesn't include UPS, the biggest shipper in the world!"
"I looked into both of them and www.shippingsidekick.com seems to be the better of the two. Redroller no longer has FedEx and never had UPS. I also sell products on eBay and I've calculated that using shippingsidekick i saved more than 14.95 a month since they compare all the major shippers. And most of the time I drop off the packages anyway so not printing the label isnt a big deal as long as i know where to go to save the most money."
"Also, if you have a heavy item that exceeds the weight limits of UPS, USPS, DHL & Fed EX that you want to sell or buy, you can get a quote against major national and regional carriers by using eBay's preferred freight provider at www.freightquote.com. They provide the service for free. If you do have any rates established with any of the carriers they already have like Roadway or Old Dominion, they will load it in the system so you can quote along side their carriers as well. Pretty cool!"
"You can also check prices using
CShip.euMoreover this is the only shipping website providing computation about carbon dioxide emissions."
"Does anyone know why redroller is down every weekend? I love the site but I try and label my packages on weekends for shipping on a Monday."
"www.ShippingSidekick.com is now free to use. If you do a Google search on Compare Shipping Rates you will see that they come up ranked #1. They must be doing something right in order to afford the top ranking on Google."
"We tried shipping sidekick, RedRoller and http://ShipGooder.com
We like ShipGooder the best for these reasons:
ShipGooder is (by far) the fastest, and easiest to use. SG includes FedEx, UPS, DHL, the UPSP and also local couriers (which the others don't).
ShipGooder is free, and even includes a Google map of the shipping route.
Shipping sidekick requires long tedious forms to fill out, and RedRoller requires an account to be set up."
"Well, I do agree shippingsidekick and redroller allows you to compare rates side by side. But then don't we always check out the major courier sites for pricing to find the cheapest rate to go with?
For me, I found www.iesexpress.com which offers rates that are cheaper than the above 2 sites. They provide instant quotes, live chat for questions, online label printing and best of all, pick up services!"
Chin
"Well, I do agree shippingsidekick and redroller allows you to compare rates side by side. But then don't we always check out the major courier sites for pricing to find the cheapest rate to go with?
For me, I found www.iesexpress.com which offers rates that are cheaper than the above 2 sites; plus they have international shipping too. They provide instant quotes, live chat for questions, online label printing and best of all, pick up services!"
Kelly
"Well ladies, compare with those websites for sure and get the rates, but before you ship try http://www.shipperscorner.com and get 50% discount over those compared rates :) Ship international ,domestic with DHL or Fedex still you'll save a lot and print your label in 2 minutes...What can i say spent your 30 seconds and save hundreds of $$$"
"Shippercorners.com is a lame. Their pricing is also not as cheap if you do compare. I visited the site and it says save 43% to india on DHL, but it didn't say shipping from where and how many days it takes. It is just trying to get people to think it is cheaper in fact it is not."
