landplanfran
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posted on March 18, 2001 07:39:57 AM new
Hi
Has anyone come up with any ideas for combined shipping on multiple wins?
It's time-consuming to calculate manually but otherwise the shipping charges would deter sales.
With all the added fees from eBay, PayPal and AW, taking time to manually combine shipping is a problem I would like to solve more efficiently.
Has anyone found a way around this time consuming process?
Thanks,
Fran
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nanastuff
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posted on March 18, 2001 07:51:37 AM new
Fran...guess I am a little confused (but that ain't hard to do lol). One of the best things I did was to get a small postal scale; weighs up to 10 lbs. I think it depends on what you sell.
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unknown
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posted on March 18, 2001 07:55:31 AM new
You should never compute exact shiping under any circumstances. It's way too time consuming. If the items you sell are all in the same range then simply pick a fixed S/H charge. Make this charge your policy. Then for additional items consider offering them free of additional charges. This will encourage people to bid on more items once they have won one.
If you have a particular item that is heavier than the normal stuff then you can just increase the opening bid to compensate.
Now if you have very bulky items such as furniture then it would be a different story.
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landplanfran
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posted on March 18, 2001 09:11:49 AM new
Clarification: I ship plants with an auction value of 3-10 dollars each. People often win several auctions. I quote shipping as 1-10 plants $5, 11-20 plants $7.50, 21-50 plants $10. Free shipping over $100.
Combined shipping does encourage sales but what a time consuming process to find one person's auctions and calculate their total bill. If my labor is worth anything and it should be, this wipes out the profit.
I haven't found a Mac comptible auction management program that will do this and I doubt that one will appear.
I just wondered if any other sellers found another way around this problem. I guess I could refuse to combine shipping for less than $100 but I see the buyer's frustration of outrageous shipping costs.
Thanks,
Fran
Fran Greicius
LandPlanFran
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nanastuff
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posted on March 18, 2001 09:17:03 AM new
What you are doing sounds great....." but I see the buyer's frustration of outrageous shipping costs." Have these complaints been toward you personally, or is this what you have seen on the boards? You give many fair options to your shipping....
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vargas
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posted on March 18, 2001 09:30:01 AM new
I use an auction management program to do my EOA's and it automatically combines auction wins.
I just look at the weight of the total wins and plug in the postage (anything from over 13 oz and up to 5 lbs goes priority). The program does all of the math.
It takes 30 seconds per winner.
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landplanfran
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posted on March 18, 2001 10:07:11 AM new
As a consumer, I am sensitive to shipping charges and I suspect my eBay customers are, too.
Unless someone has a novel idea to combining shipping efficiently, I see no option but to discontinue offering it and just go with my free shipping on combined wins over $100.
Fran Greicius
LandPlanFran
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auctionee
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posted on March 18, 2001 10:23:41 AM new
Personally, I would keep the same basic idea you are using now. It sounds to me that the time consuming part is for you to search through all of your closed auctions trying to identify all of the multiple winners in order to send them a correct bill (please correct me if I am wrong). What I would do, is send and EOA for each item individually with the individual shipping charges and a note something to the effect of "if you have won more than 1 auction and would like the shipping combined at the reduced rate, e-mail me the auction numbers with your shipping information". That way, the customer will match up the auctions for you which should save you a great deal of time if you are selling a large volume.
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landplanfran
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posted on March 18, 2001 10:39:45 AM new
Well thank you so kindly!!!
You understood correctly the root of my problem and your idea is fabulous!
It does put the responsibility on them to provide adequate info so I can save some time while they save some money.
Thank you for a win-win solution!!!!
Fran
Fran Greicius
LandPlanFran
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