Sellers: Have You Ever Underestimated the Shipping?
By Pigglies
@Pigglies (9329)
United States
October 2, 2008 9:29am CST
Usually I have been pretty good at estimating shipping. Especially UPS shipping because we used that at a place I worked in the past. But I've noticed that the USPS shipping calculator is often incorrect.
I shipped out a textbook priority mail halfway across the US, and it was calculated to be $12 so I charged the buyer $12. Then I went to the post office and they charged me $22.
I saw on eBay too that they are going to change shipping to be a standard fee on textbooks like they do with Half.com. I think it was something like $4 that they'll give you for shipping soon. That's even worse! Even media mail isn't that cheap.
I figure it all evens out though. As a buyer I've received packages a few times where the shipping was more than the seller had expected. And I've sent out a few with a few dollars over the estimated shipping myself. But wow, $10 off is just bad. I hate the post office.
1 person likes this
3 responses
@desertdarlene (8910)
• United States
2 Oct 08
Yeah, I've had that happen, especially when I used to sell larger, framed paintings. But, I bought my own scale and had been much better with shipping costs since.
As for textbooks, I believe you could have used the 4th class rate and it's really cheap. Did you tell your postmaster that you were shipping printed material? Book rate is always cheaper and pretty much any type of printed material can go that way. I think, also, some computer storage material can go book rate, too, but it takes longer to get anywhere.
@Pigglies (9329)
• United States
6 Oct 08
I estimated the weight correctly, but somehow I must have got the dimensions of the box or something incorrect.
It is correct that you can ship books through media mail. However, media mail shipping takes forever and the person who bought the books asked for priority mail, not media mail so it would have been unethical for me to give them a lower quality shipping service.
