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!