SHIPPING & HANDLING

After selling items on E-Bay for many years, I've finally come to the realization (way too late), that offering free shipping does not offer any benefit to the seller or buyer. In fact it actually is detrimental.

Shipping in some States is a non-taxable item.

The realization I've come to is that quite a bit of labor is required to process the shipment, from the time to opening the SOLD e-mail to driving to the post office/UPS/Fed-Ex.

In the end, I found that I was making less than minimum wage, and was actually losing money on many of my sales (after e-bay fees & Paypal's cut).

As an example, I recently sold 2 ic sockets for $11. After e-bay & Paypal, I'm now close to $9.75

Since the envelope (which weighed very little), was considered "stiff" due to the protective packaging, USPS charged $3.90

Now I'm down to $5.85

Then the material: envelope, packing material, tape

Then the labor to pack

but the biggest amount of time is driving to the post office, waiting in line, etc etc.

I hope one can see where I'm going with this.

The final result is that this order cost me more to process than the $5.85 net.

So I've adjusted how I price my product.

The price of the product is priced very competitively (very low).

But the S & H charge (labor) is reflective of my actual costs.