Transcripts
1. Welcome To Etsy Shipping!: when I was getting started on etc. I know that one of the things that scared the pants off of me was trying to figure out shipping and I watched videos and I went in the forums and I heard all kinds of horror stories about how people had lost things or things that broke in. And I thought, Oh my gosh, how am I going to do that? And then I just kind of pulled it all together and decided that I was going to try shipping . I have, ah, vintage store, so everything I ship is different. There are all different weights, all different sizes, all different countries. And so over the last couple of years, I have learned how to ship almost everything, and in addition to that, I'm a giant shipping nerd, and I have shipping friends and we actually call each other when we find a really cool new shipping idea. And so what I hope for you is that this course can kind of your shipping friends so that if you have a question about something, you know, you can go look up one of my videos and see how are you going to ship something very heavy . Should you do this priority? Should you offer international shipping? Where do you get shipping supplies? What do you have tohave and what can you start out with and just sweep by with? So I'm pretty frugal in the shipping department. I know a lot of good sources for supplies that are not super expensive from free to. I don't know. I don't really spend all that much of my shipping. So I can't wait to really work with you and give you some ideas for how to make your shipping easy, fast, much better. Darren Jacobson marketing artfully.
2. Why Use Etsy Shipping: before we get started with all the details. I just want to talk to you for a minute. I teach ah lot of in person classes to people who are thinking about doing it to your who have just started with etc. And who really don't understand why they should use the shipping within, etc. They know how to use the post office. They understand that, and they don't necessarily understand how shipping works, works in etc. And so they're a little bit hesitant to use it. So here's my reasons that I always give them why you should use etc. Shipping. So first off, it's less expensive as he has worked with the United States Postal Service to get US discounted rates. So if the actual shipping costs would be, say, 3 61 we may pay to 77 if the actual shipping costs when you went to the Post office to do first class mail would be or excuse me, priority mail would be $17 we may pay $14 so there's a discount built right in just by using the shipping. Additionally, there is tracking within etc. And they email them frequently and let them know where there were their packages, so you don't have to do that. And that's amazing. I mean, I have other websites where have to do my own customer service, and one of the benefits of using etc. Is that they will actually keep your clients customers updated with where their packages. So you don't have to put in a shipping number or anything like that. Now, if you decided you wanted to do shipping your own way and then get a tracking number, you could actually do that and then just put it in the shipping interface and etc. But there's no reason to do that. It's super easy. It's very convenient. It's less expensive. And if you're just getting started, I would totally recommend using the etc shipping.
3. Shipping Supplies You Need and Extra Fun Ones: So now we're gonna do a little bit of a show and tell because thes air the shipping materials that I feel like you have tohave and then a lot of them that I use that you don't have to have. So my very first you have tohave item is a scale. Okay, I like a digital scale. You can get it on eBay. I think mine was about $18. This will save you so much time and energy. And then the other thing that I really like about this one is it has what's called a hold button. So if you put a giant box on here and you can't see the little screen, you can push the whole button and then it will actually tell you how much it waas. The next thing you have to have is bubble wrap. I tend to use this little skinny bubble wrap, and it's biodegradable ish. It's not the kind that totally melts, but it's relatively good for the environment. And then it's six Serie. It'd so it pulls apart, which is really super nice. I didn't find that that's aerated kind actually cost any more than normal bubble wrap So I would say if you confined that I'm going to have a list of all these things in the book all exactly what you should get, and it's easy peasy. My next thing is a two parter. Number one you need to have strapping tape, which is this clear, heavy tape. And that is one of the things that I learned early on when I was learning about shipping. Ah, guy who it worked in a warehouse said I told my goes, tape is cheap. Breakage is expensive. And so I have taken that to heart. If I'm reusing a box, I will take the bottom of it again. If I am taping up a box, I will take a lot like so much that you think, Oh, gosh, this is never gonna break open. Okay? Lots of tape. Then. This was the thing that really changed my life. It scares my family, but this is like a giant tape dispenser for this tape I used that I started with. And if that's what you have, use it. I started with the roller tape that you do when you're kind of moving, and we had recently moved, so I had some smaller ones. I had some bigger ones. But I will say that that that probably is one of my favorite things, and it would sort of be on my early to get lists. Another thing you need when you start is clean filth. So I buy rolls of just paper. You can use anything you have. So if one reason I like this paper is because it's not colored and so it will not change, it won't hurt any of my packages. That's something to think about. I know a lot of people like to use newsprint. I know a lot of people like to use comics, and as long as you have an outer covering to whatever you're shipping so that color doesn't transfer, I think you're fine. The's are also something that we talked about in the priority mail video, but I I have heard and I have experienced this a little bit thes air. The priority mail envelopes okay, there padded. They're the lowest price. They're the same price as the ah small box, maybe a wee bit more, but they you can fit a lot into these, and I feel like it's a little harder to get them than some of the other boxes. So, for if Christmas time is coming up or if you do weddings and your season is coming up, make sure you get an order. Those from the USPS site. Okay, Now I'm gonna show you some of my funds. So the next thing that I started doing and these save A, I don't really worry about how anything is branded. I have never had somebody. I've shipped over 500 items way more than that. I've never had somebody say shifted to me in an eBay boxer who shipped it to me in an Amazon box. That's not what they're focusing on. So the sooner you can buy boxes that are a normal size that you use all the time. It will save you money in the long run just from your time. So instead of having to scrabble around, try to find boxes asking people, it does help to buy those. I get mine from eBay. They're relatively inexpensive. They probably I would say all of my packing materials add up to less than I would say 30 cents a package on most of them. Okay. The next thing that I got when I was doing this Waas patted mailers. So when I'm shipping something little, I love the fact that they're pink because I have a pink issue. All my branding is pink. I love the fact that they're pink, but that they add a wee little bit more protection and they're very lightweight there. They're not hardly any weight at all, and those are super nice. I love that the branding comes when somebody sees it in their mailbox. They're gonna get excited about it. It's just a really nice feature I also use, and I didn't bring a piece of it. I also use pink tissue paper, So what I'll do is I will wrap my item in the bubble wrap. I will have another tricky thing. I'll show you in a second. I'll tape it up or I'll, I'll wrap it up and then I'll put the pink tissue paper on the outside. The reason why I wrap it first is I don't want that pink color to transfer to anything, so just be careful of that. The other reason I like these is because they provide a little bit of protection. They're not you can't submerge them in water. But if they're in a mailbox and there some rain, if there's if they're put on a front porch and it gets a little splashy, they're going to be fine. They're they're semi to my waterproof. This is a card that I use off. This is a card that I use that I put in there and I say things for your order. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me. I have them. Give them my phone number, give them my email address and a 10% off coupon. There are a lot of people that really want to use the etc combo system, and that's is important if you can get them to use the convo system. I'm I suggest you do that a lot of people will. But when etc. Opened up it for a guest, you can check out with a guest rather than being in etc. Person. I started getting a lot more sales and that meant people were going to etc. They just used the Etsy website by They weren't going and checking for Congo's. They weren't logging in. They weren't doing anything like that and I don't want my customers to get frustrated, so I do put my phone number on there. I've had people call there so funny. They're they're surprised that I answer or that I call them back. And I think there were two or three in hundreds, and I also have people email me. And for me, emails the best you may want to say, Can you please text me? Because that's the best way to do it for you? What you want to do is you want to make sure that they can reach out to you if they feel like they have a problem. The nice thing about how I package is when somebody comes to their mailbox and they get this, they're all excited. They've ordered something, they pull it out. And while they're pulling it out, I've read numerous places. The psychology of it is they're worried that it won't be what they expected, and their number one fear is that they can't figure out how to return it. And I alleviate that fear before they even open their product. And that way I wind up with people who are predisposed to like what I said them rather than being upset. All right, I just have a couple more things. I don't buy these. These air, those giants air pox. What I do do is my husband has a little shopping thing from Amazon, actually, and he gets lots of those. I do save those. Now, the one thing that you want to know is that they are not all that helpful for preventing breakage. Okay, if you have a box and you put your item in there and you put a couple of these in there Sorry about that. If you put a couple of these in there and think that that's going to stop it from banging around in the box, it's not. They shift, they move, they go all over the place. For me, the Onley thing that I used them for is to help fill the space in the box. Is your items probably will not break in transit unless they can really bang around in that box to think about that five foot drop. If you have your item in your box and you have a big box around it and nothing to fill that space than it's dropping five feet and then it's slamming down after it gets there. But if you have things around it like clean fill or these puffy air pillows help fill up those spaces that will stop your items from breaking. I also use the tightening bubble wrap. I know that there are people that recommend using a little bit larger bubble wrap, and you could do that. I'm just trying to get you the things that you absolutely need to have, and then some of the tricky fund things that I've learned along the way that are really, really the things that help. So this last item, my girlfriend came and she's one of my etc buddy or one of my Eve, a shipping buddies. And she said, We have to goto lows and I'm like, OK, well, good aloes. And she said, We have to go to Lowe's. We have to get a lows. This thing you have to get it. And what we went and got was a little it was smaller than this. I ordered this one. Once I found out it was good that I ordered it on eBay. It is Saran wrap on a roll, and what you do is you which bubble wrap around, and then you do a quick saran wrap around and you're done. If you shipped lots of things that are weird sizes or weird shapes or bigger or require a lot of bubble wrap, I can't recommend that enough in. She was right. It changed my life. It makes it much easier to wrap. So just for a briefly let's talk about where to get your shipping supplies. We talked a bunch about the priority, which is awesome. That's free. You can choose whether you shit priority for everything or not. But if you're gonna be getting your own shipping materials when you start out, it's really easy to be used to going to Home Depot to get something, or to be used to going toe Walmart to get it something. And they do have some really good deals. Occasionally, I just saw recently they had a great deal on bubble wrap at Wal Mart, and if you can pick him up there, that's super. But for most of what you want to get, you're gonna want to start treating your shipping department like a bit like you're a business and you want to start buying at a cost that is lower. I have found personally that buying from eBay for the shipping materials is the least expensive for me. I know a lot of people like to use you line you l i n e dot com or you could check out Amazon. But what will happen is when you can get those shipping costs down, you'll find that you wrap things better because you're not trying to skimp on bubble wrap. You'll find that you put things in the right box cause you have the correct box size instead of just using what you have. And I really feel that if you can gradually start getting this I didn't by all of this the first day. I didn't even have a scale. The first day I used the little skill that we had in our kitchen. That was two way things. And after I made some money that I bought the good scale, I I use the tape that we had left over for moving, and then I bought a big box of it. I'm still using today. Two years later, you don't have to have all these things to start. But once you are a little bit established. I think that there are some things that you can buy that are going to make a huge difference in the amount of time it takes you to ship and also the quality of your shipping . So hopefully that helps Terra Jacobson marketing artfully.
4. Oopsie Shipping Supplies - Two More You Need!: This is my I can't forget. Can't believe I forgot these two super important things for our shipping supplies. So the 1st 1 is pre printed label size stickers, and I bought 1000 of those two years ago on, and I haven't used a 1,000,000 it was $18. Something like that. It is so worth it. Because instead of just printing out your sticker on it paper and then putting tape over it , it is the most important part of your shipping. It's what the mail people used to scan. It's what the the they scan when they take it from your house or when you take it to the post office. It's what they scan when they deliver it. Somebody. And so I would say that that is one of the things that I got early on that was really helpful and made it way more fun to do my shipping just in all actuality. And the other thing that I forgot to mention is Polly Mailers, these air those little plastic, you know, just plastic bags, because I shipped more fragile things. I don't use them a lot, which is why I forgot them honestly. but they're amazing for using. I use them for my international shipments when I need to get him up to 10 inches. I know a lot of people who ship clothing or you ship anything fabric, or that you can use these for that. A reason I love them is because they sort of make your item waterproof. And that way you're able to avoid any problems with if they got left in a wet mailbox if they if anything like that happened. So these are really neat. And the other nice thing about him is this is my normal size and this is my giant side so you can buy giant size Polly Miller's. And I know that a lot of people who ship jeans or coats or if you're doing blankets if you're shipping stuffed animals, you may want to do that. If you make those really cute cruciate stuffed animals, it's a wonderful way to do it, and they're really inexpensive to buy. So when you're starting out that maybe one of the first things you want to get
5. All About Priority Mail: Now we're gonna talk about priority mail in the United States Postal Service. There are definitely reasons to use priority mail. It's insured up to $100 in the United States and $200 internationally. It gets things. They're faster and you get free shipping supplies. Now, I have heard some people that talked about I ship everything priority mail, no matter how big or small it is. And I have to say that that I feel like that's a little bit unrealistic. If you have a tiny item that really should cost two or $3 to ship and they're charging them and you're charging six or $7 to ship it, there's a good chance you might be losing sales because of that. And in that case, you would want to get your own boxes and ship first class. But I do understand that it is your store you ship, however you want. We're gonna go through all the different types of priority mail today. It'll be fun, so let me show you where to get it. We have Malin ship order stamps and supplies shipping supplies. There's a 1,000,000 ways to get here and then free shipping supplies. This is where you're gonna go for these Now, I have opened up these taps so that we can do this in kind of a understandable order. The one thing that most of us know about when we're not shipping nerds is these flat rate boxes. And we tend to think that priority mail is just these frightening boxes. I know I did when I started, and it really messed me up because they have a size that is called game board size, something like that. And so the first game I sold, I shipped out in that box. It was $17 in shipping. I think I charged, you know, a few books, maybe seven bucks for shipping, but then the game was only 17 but so I really messed up with that. But if you are shipping something super heavy far away, so I live in in Florida. If I'm shipping to California, a flat rate boxes amazing for me. It's on Lee the cost of the box, no matter how heavy it is or how far away it goes. And we'll talk about that a little bit as we go. So those flat rate boxes. They have small, medium large. They have some weird sizes. It's good to get. I would get a couple of these variety packs just so you can start to familiarize yourself with the different sizes. The next kind of priority mail that is exciting is this patted flat rate envelope, and it it doesn't matter how heavy The thing you put in there is You can ship it for. It's about 6 to $7 it's a pretty good size. Now they don't. What I started doing when I started was I would fold it all over and I would tape it up. They don't want you to do that. If you have, Flappy is on the edge as long as thes air. Some of those If it fits a chips, they want you to put it in here. I have found that a nine by six by three box cut down just a wee bit fits in here. And so if you have to ship a box and protected a little bit, it works great. My six by four by fours also fit in here beautifully, so I can provide a little bit of protection for the item, but still get that really cheap fast shipping. Right? Then we have the priority mail boxes that are not flat rate. This is super important. This is a seven by seven by six size box. When you ship this one, they are not going to be looking at, ah, flat rate so you can ship something that's three ounces in this. It'll just get there faster. You can ship something super heavy in this, and it'll just get there for faster. The problem with that is, if, say, you were to ship something that was super heavy, you would want to goto a flat rate cause this could get up into 20 or $30 to ship. So these ones are amazing. I love the seven by seven by six, and this one is super confusing. It took me the longest time to find it, and my mail lady is the one that actually told me it's ah, large mailing box. It's actually called priority mailbox seven. It's a large milling box, but it is not flat rate, so it's just a bigger box that you can use, and then you're gonna put your weight and your size and you're the distance is going to determine what this is. I like This made my heart go pitter patter because I did not know that there was a larger box that you could use. And it's a little confusing because it says large, but it doesn't say large, flat rate. Okay, you cannot use the flat rate boxes for just regular mail. If you put, say, a regular flat rate box in and you just put a mailing label and it's less than what it is, your customer at the other end could have to pay the difference in that. Or it could get held up at the post office or sent back to you. Don't want that. This was probably the most confusing to me when I was doing this. This is priority regional rate boxes, and they have two different kinds. Regional rate A and regional rate. B A is a little smaller. B has a little bit bigger boxes, and what these do is they base it entirely on regions of the country radiating out from where you live. So for me, I have my closest region is gonna be in Florida and then my next closest region is gonna be Georgia, right? My next closest may get a little further out to Alabama and Tennessee, those types of things. And then when you get to California, it's gonna be the furthest away region. Or maybe you know who I you want to look at the address of where your shipping it and then check and see which is gonna be cheaper air. Be usually a zehr, always cheaper than these. But say you have a not so heavy box, maybe a couple pounds that is going to the next state over. I would definitely look at a regional A or a regional be box. You may be able to save a ton in shipping using those regional boxes. So when you see regional and you have to order these, they're all here. Let's look at this. They all say regional box A or regional box be. And what you're gonna do is you're gonna have these boxes. I just order a small pack of them like 10 box says. And I have them in a big shipping box that I had from moving, and I haven't stacked up with a little sticker that tells me every size that I have And then when I'm doing and I'll show you this when we ship a priority mail piece out when I'm doing something that is priority mail, I will. And it's close. I ship a lot to New York. It doesn't help to New York. I ship a lot toe. California doesn't help to California. But I shipped a really heavy, really heavy door stop to I think it was Georgia and the regional rate was so much lower. Okay, our next one is the priority mail express sticker. I can't believe I didn't know that when I started, I got all my priority mail boxes and then I would ship something that was just a little bit too big for the seven. My seven. I would ship it in this giant priority mail box. Or, you know, I would be sitting there trying to figure out, like even which size box that would fit in. I didn't care if I had to pay extra money. And the funny thing is, you can use any box you want to for priority mail, and you don't even have to put these stickers on it. But you can put the sticker on it, and that helps the postage people when they're sorting. And they're doing things like that to know that you've paid extra for that fast shipping. They're still required to ship it. It'll show it on the sticker. But you really want to make sure that you if you're gonna be shipping your own boxes a lot , I have found that that this I mean, they're free stickers. You put those on there and you let them know that that's gonna be a priority item. And especially, I just saw this one. I think this is new, that it is a special, fragile handling one, and I'm going to use this now You will hear on the Etsy boards. If you put fragile on there, then they're gonna just they're gonna mess with your package. They're going Teoh be mean, and they're gonna they're not. They have a job to do their super busy. The I went to a distribution center with my son and the amount of mail that goes through that place. They are not trying to do anything but get your package there now, just so you know, those packages can be dropping five feet. So you really need to make sure that your packaging your item with the idea that it could have a five foot drop. So that's why it was so bad to actually put a small item in a really big box, because when that came flying over and it drops down, it's just gonna shatter. There's there, you know? No matter how much bubble wrap I put on, it's gonna have too much movement inside of the box. So this is really good. Now I'm gonna pause you for just one second because I want to go find those international labels because you get those here too. All right. I just went back to our shipping area and I just found them right here. They're called customs form envelopes, and those are the little pouches that you need to put your shipping materials in your your printed out custom declarations were and and I have a video about this so you don't have to be nervous that you put those in and it just sticks on the outside of the box. Now it does need to be 10 and Chirac's needs to be 10 inches on a side I just saw that there are smaller customs labels. I I just used 10 inch boxes or what I What I have done in the past is if I had a smaller box, I would just put a poly mailer on the outside of it, one of those thin polling Miller's and go ahead and do it that way. Either way, you can use either the small customs forms or the large. I have just found that using the large ones, I feel I've watched my mail lady do it. It's easy for her to scan, and I feel like that would be a good way to get it to go. So hopefully this helps terror Jacobson marketing artfully.
6. How To Set Up Your Listings - Lightweight Products: Okay, so this is fun. We're gonna set up our first listing, and this is a very light item. It is only 4.4 ounces before packaging. I have found that packaging, usually for something like this that is small is not gonna be more than six ounces were well under the 16 ounce, £1 mark. That would mean we would have to bump up to priority. So this is just a plain Jane Little item that we're gonna ship and it's it's coasters. It's tougher work coasters. Six coasters in a little in a little tray. Very cute. We have all the normal information. Don't. Down, down, down, down, down. And here we are at shipping. I always go with Calculate them for me. I'll talk a little bit more about this in the international, but for me, it just works out so much better. I don't have to think about it. There are some girls who figure out their own amount, and they do it. It also, especially for light items. It could make more sense for you to do them as a fixed cost. Say you make cards or you make jewelry or you make something that's relatively light. You may want to set a cost of 2 50 or set a cost of a dollar because you know you can ship it for first class. All right, so let's go. We're gonna get started. 34655 is my zip code. I like to put They have the option of one Business day all the way out. 68 weeks to unknown. If you are a handmade Sylar, you may have a longer time. I have a client who I did a lot of work for her. She makes earns, and what happens is she gets the order in. She has conversations with the people. After the order comes in, they decide on color. She has to go and cast the item at a studio. Then they have to wait for it to cure than she has to glaze it and cast it again. There's no like there's no way to get around it if they want a custom one. Now she does have some that are all ready to go, which she then puts in as ready to ship. But for these customized ones, it does take a while. We had 4 to 6 weeks as the lead time. So you want to do that? It's not necessarily so much for etc. I don't think they didn't you the way that other services dio But your client's gonna be unhappy if if you I ordered Oh my gosh. I ordered the cute ist ceramic, a little wax melt holder and first off, it was coming from Russia are coming from the Ukraine somewhere over there and then second it they I guess they made them to order or made them to order ish and they let me know, is gonna take 3 to 4 weeks. I think 3 to 4 weeks must be one of them 3 to 4 weeks and I was fine with that. I had looked everywhere. I could not find what I wanted. If you're a handmade seller and you're selling something really unique, please don't let people tell you that you can't do it. I think that there is a riel pressure by people to say, you know, you should be able to ship everything out one, just two days. If you're lead time is a little while. I also did a planner cover and the gal. Let me know that the planner cover was going to be It was gonna take a while to get out. Now she did email me occasionally during that time and say, Hey, just want to let you know you're about two weeks out or you're about a week out. That is a pain in the butt toe have to do. I understand that. But the longer your lead time, the more you're gonna have to check in with the people and let them know that you didn't forget them. And then also for your shipping for did they want it wrapped? Did they want it a certain way? This isn't necessarily shipping, but if you're personalizing, did you get all the convo, those from them or conversations from them in your notes? It's really easy to forget things in four weeks or six weeks, so make sure you have a system for really making sure that you're making the right item for each person. But anyways, shipping time, you can have as long as you want. You even have a known like good. No, hello, But I do wonder two business days just because I don't like to be pressured 99.9% of the time. I send it out the next day just because I like to have them off my plate. If I can. Every once in a while, I'll squeak about that same day. I don't do that very often, but if I'm already packing doing my shipping, I do it in the morning from before my kids go to school. So it's kind of a weird time Anyways. I can't really work work, so it's the perfect time for me. And then sometimes they'll help me hold things and my son for his, um, for his school. They asked to tell you about your your parents, and he said, My mom is the best shipper, which made me feel so good anyways. Forcing. So we're all ship now. We're gonna talk a little bit on this in almost every video because it's such a big deal. You can choose to ship Onley in the United States, and if you're gonna do Onley in the United States, you would push this little arrow down. You're going to say no countries, and then it will just have North America, and in that case, you're just shipping to the United States. If you're in the United States, that's kind of the only shipping I know about. So hopefully you're But you don't have to do that. You can say all countries and this is gonna be first class to a lot of the country's. So let's talk about that. I do not ship to sub Saharan Africa. I don't ship to North Africa, the Middle East. Their delivery at the other end is in great. And there is some criminal activity in some of those places. Not all of them. But for me as an Etsy seller, that's a choice that I've made, that I don't ship to those areas. And then I don't ship to Europe either, because they have what's called a fat tax value added tax and it increases the cost. I'll talk more about that on on the large package that I did anywhere else. I'm more than happy to ship. I have no problem. Okay, male classes. Let's look at that. So we have priority mail, priority mail, express ups, first class ups, priority mail, International Express International and first Class International. Now first class international goes up to £4 I really don't have a problem shipping First Class International. I would say up to a certain price range, and that's really based on my feeling that they I would say a good cut off point for me would be $50. If it's gonna be more than that, I really don't want it. I don't want to be shipping something overseas that could take 6 to 6 weeks to Dio, and it's $200. I have lots of items in my shop that are well over $100. I don't I just don't want that problem. I can sell it to somebody in the United States. So I been for this, this little cute thing. It's $15. It's really acute set now. I was doing real quick because this is important. I was doing the MARMA lead search of this and I'll put a link to them there, and there are a bunch of people that have these little Tupperware coasters. I want you 344 on the first page. What can make me really different and make my items sell when there's won't is if they will not ship overseas. I have found that I can charge a little bit more crazy, but a little bit more, and I will get faster sales because I'm willing to ship overseas. So that's super nice. I like that. I should be a lot to Australia. Asian Pacific is Hong Kong. I ship a lot the Hong Kong. Both of those have countries have monetary systems that benefit from the change right now. So I'm more than happy to ship him there. So all of those air welcome. And then we'll talk about this button. That's only for heavier items. So I'm more than willing to ship any of these ways. Free domestic shipping. You have a choice you condone shipped domestically, free or not, if you're shipping something very cheaply, one of the nice things about it is, then they kind of get whatever shipping you do. I don't I don't ever do free shipping. I'd rather just charge a fair amount of shipping handling fee. I don't have a handling fee on little tiny packages like this because they're they're small . They're not hard to ship and then pounds. Okay, let's talk about this So it's 4.4 ounces unpacked on small items like this. So you figure the box is gonna be small. I'm going to ship this in a six by four by four box. So it's only this big. It's a tiny little box. It is gonna be about six ounces at the most for the box and the packing, so it's already four ounces at six ounces. It's gonna be 10 ounces if it's a bigger. So the bigger the item gets, the heavier the package and gets just from the weight of the cardboard in the size of the box. So if I was going to be shipping this in a little Polly Mailer, which you're just those flippy plastic ones, it would be even less. It could be a couple of ounces at the most, including the bubble mailer, the packing, all of that. It just depends on what your shipping. I try to ship most of my things in boxes just because they're old. He could fall apart, but you may be able to ship in Poly Miller's. You may be able to ship and patted envelopes those air gonna be very, very low weight, In which case you would only add, maybe say, I don't know maybe a couple ounces to the the amount this is the shipped sighs the actual ship sides. Okay, And then my length is gonna be 654 by four. I know we've talked about this or we're gonna talk about this. I have boxes that I buy in certain sizes because I ship a lot of things. 654 by four is one of my little size boxes. I also do eight by six by four, which is kind of a little fatter, but not really much bigger. And so I know off the top of my head now what you could do if you're nervous. And this is what I did when I started out, I would take my item. I would take a piece of bubble wrap because I knew I would be using a piece of bubble wrap . I would take a piece of paper cause I knew I was gonna be putting a packing slip in there. I would put all of that on the scale with the box and measure exactly how much it's gonna be. And that way you never have to worry that you're going to go over the other thing the other place where I really pay attention is if it's going to go over a pound. So say this item was already 10 backed announces and I wanted to add six ounces of shipping materials. In that case, I may actually go and way the box and see Oh, the boxes. Two ounces, I'm fine. Or if you weigh the box and it waas already four ounces and getting awful close to that pound and I don't want to have to pay the additional shipping amount. So in that case, you could absolutely go ahead and just way all the shipping materials together with your item and you would know exactly what it is. This is really neat this very last bit here, it will tell you how much it's gonna cost to mail it to Chicago. So it's gonna be 3 75 That's really normal. It'll cost for something to up 3 75 to L. A. So the whole way through, it's just not gonna cost anymore. Sometimes in the have your weight, shipping it to Los Angeles is going to cost a lot more. Here. It will show you what the cost a ship to International. Now this is really nice. There's people that will contact you and say, How much is it gonna cost a ship to so and so? What you can do is you can go into your listing. You can say edit, and then you can come in here and do the drop down. It will cost $22.75 to ship to Australia. Now you may be thinking it's a $15 item. Why would somebody from Australia get that? Well, if this is the one that their mom had or their Grammy had, or if you're doing a custom jewelry piece and they can't find anybody else in the world that would make it or you're doing a super special painting and they adore it, there's a reason why you don't need a question why people are willing to pay ah price to ship things. You just need to make sure that you cover yourself and do the right shipping, just with the right shipping amount, the size in the box and how much the way it is. There have been very few times that I have gotten burned with shipping. Mostly, it's just been my fault and a lot of it was based around the priority there is going to if we haven't. If you haven't watched yet, there's going to be a video right around priority mail, and that will kind of tell you all the bits about that. Hopefully that helps terror Jacobson are getting our plea.
7. How To Set Up Your Listings - Heavy Products: for this one. We're gonna ship a large item. This is a large book. It looks like a book, but it's actually this really cool. Hardwood heavy brass edges hinges. Open it up Jewelry box and it ISS super neat and super heavy and sort of large. It's pretty big. It is actually 13 inches wide, 13.5 inches wide at the largest dimension. So it's a big item. I have all my stuff in here. We're not really going to go through that. I did put the dimensions of the item in here, so they're gonna be able to see that in the attributes. I have information. I didn't want to put my shipping up here in here. Sometimes I'll put things like I will talk about this later with handling. I'm paying to have this professionally shit packed. Sometimes I'll tell them I'm gonna be shipping it in a small size box. Things like that. So now we go through everything. Everything. Now we're to shipping. There are two ways to pick the shipping. I'll enter fix cost manually. And in that case, what you would do is you go to a site like USPS. You would go to UPS. You. I like fit shipper. They'll do estimating costs for you, and you would find out exactly what the cost of shipping the item would be. And then you're gonna put it in manually. Pretty obvious. I don't like doing this, But if you're shipping something, say you're a jewelry maker and you know the exact cost to ship things both here and overseas. If you're shipping internationally, you could absolutely do this. I have found that some of the ladies really like to do this. It feels very comfortable to them. They know exactly what the shipping cost is gonna be. Maybe they've sold hundreds of them, and they're like, OK, this is how much this cost a ship. Now, one of the problems with this for me personally is twofold. First off, I sell vintage things so it could weigh from three ounces to £20 too much of a swing for me to really want to go figure all this out. And the second thing is, I live in Florida. So the cost for me to ship to California is higher than the cost for me to ship within the state of Florida. or even to New York or Chicago. There's a big difference in price. So for me, it just makes sense for me to tell at sea to calculate it for me. And then you go ahead and put 34655 is my zip code. You would want to put your own zip code in and then processing time. We've talked about this a little bit. In other videos. I like to use 1 to 2 business days simply because occasion I usually do next day, but occasionally I'm super busy or I'm out of town and I need that extra day and they don't really doing you if you ship it after. But you're your customers gonna be sad and I don't like my custard or be sat. Here is the next thing to look at where all ship. We've talked about this a little bit. Maybe in the past you can choose to ship internationally or you can choose to ship just in the United States. I ship internationally with exclusions, so if you click that arrow down, you'll get all countries. So Asian Pacific is. Hong Kong is in there. I know. I shipped to Hong Kong relatively frequently, which is awesome sub Saharan Africa and not North Africa to me or places that have a lot of crime. They have a lot of scammers coming out of there, so I don't necessarily want to ship their, especially because the mail service from the time it gets to the country to the point of arrival, is maybe not, as you know, specific as the United States Postal Service. So that's my choice. You could choose to ship to their even when I shipped everywhere before I knew all this about shipping. I never got any orders from there, so I don't know that it would really be a big deal. But I just choose not to do that. That's your choice. Okay, Europe is a big deal for me. I have I used to ship to Europe, and I have shipped to Europe successfully. But I have found within the last six months or so that I have gotten two or three items back from Europe where the buyer has refused the item because they don't want to pay what is called a vat tax. That means value added tax, and that can be up to 25% of the cost of the item. So if they buy $100 they're gonna pay for the item. They're gonna pay this shipping, they're gonna get it in Europe, and then they're going to receive a notification that says they owe an extra 25%. In this case, it would be $25. Okay. And what happens is that that if they do not pay that tax and were not allowed to pay it for them, then they do not receive their item. And then it just has gone on a long trip around. And I refund it sometimes with the chipping, sometimes without the shipping. But it's just not worth it to me. There's no reason for me to send my products on a world tour if they're not gonna consistently get delivered. So I don't do that now. I will. If somebody approaches me and says, I see you don't ship to Europe, would you ship it to me? And we have a conversation and I say, You know, about the VAT tax? They say I had one lady recently shows funny. She's like, Oh, I know about the VAT tax In that case, I have no problem changing that listing. But I just don't want random people to be able to buy from Europe because it's been a problem for me personally. Latin America. I've never shipped anything there, but I'd be happy to North America. This is fun because this is actually Canada. A lot of times I know people will ship, maybe not internationally, but will feel comfortable shipping to Canada. And I think that that would be really a good midway staff. If you're trying to figure out chipping internationally and then Australia and New Zealand and OSI Ana, I ship a lot to Australia and they their economies pretty good right now. So they buy things from us. The money exchange goes in their favor and so I happy to shipped Australia. I've never had a problem with that. Here is six ups, male classes and when I started, I really I sort of understood this and I would pick Well, this is a really big box so they could do USPS priority. I knew it was over The weight. The weight four first class is £1 in the United States and £4 internationally I don't know that they would give them that option, but I don't wanna let them have it. If they accidentally did that, it could mess up my shipping costs. So I take those two off. And then if you were to look at the cost to ship that right now, it's going to be expensive. It's going to be a big, heavy box, and there are some people that do want to pay, either because they need it very quickly or they work for a company and they don't really care about the package service. But there is another option for heavy heavy boxes, and it's under here. And it was hiding, so I never knew about it. So Media Mehlis for books just plain looks, not books with whom, with jewelry boxes inside but plain books music. This doesn't apply to that. It is a very inexpensive way to ship, but it has to be for media now. This other little guy right here is my saving grace for a lot of things. This is called USPS Parcel Select Ground, and it allows you to ship it out. In a longer timeline. It's gonna be 2 to 9 days instead of 2 to 3 days, and they see that when the ship ings there and what happens is you're able to ship larger packages, and from my understanding you can go up to 70 inches. So if you had 30 30 30 it would be too big. But if you had 30 30 10 that 70 inches and you would be able to ship it. So if you're shipping a large picture something like that, that is the saving grace for me because they get the chance to pick a cheaper shipping. I know when I went when I found this and I was like, What is this? I went back on some of my larger packages, and they wound up selling because before the shipping was like $45 nobody was gonna buy about that. Okay, free shipping. Let's talk about this a little bit. If you are shipping heavy items, you could offer free shipping. It is going to make it look better Number one, but it's expensive to ship heavy items. I'm the kind of person I would rather have their shipping costs exactly what it is then, too. Try toe fool anybody by having a lower cost, and that one time I would do free domestic shipping is if I sell these, you sharpen their stones and you sharpen your blade on him and they fit in that small shipping box so I could do one of two things. I could do a flat rate shipping and only sell it to the United States or sell it internationally, knowing how much that box WAAS or I could say it was free domestic shipping because I know the cost is going to be about $6. I that's up to you. This really is your business. You can make that choice. There are people in the world like my mother in law, who, if it doesn't say free shipping, she almost won't buy it, so it will open you up to people. You just need to make sure that you're covering that cost of shipping in your in the cost of your sale. I don't know that I would ever do free international shipping. The shipping costs vary to different countries, and to me, that would just be scary. But like I said, if you're shipping in a flat rate box priority, you you could know exactly how much that cost was Handling fee. This is exciting to me. I had a really cool box that was a large, super large, mere with filigree around the edges made out of plaster. And I did not feel comfortable packing that myself. And so I took it to the UPS store around the corner and had them packet. It costs $30 to pack it. So what I did was I split the cost of that with them. I would have had the cost to buy a box for the packing peanuts, things like that anyways. But functionally, I put in a $15 handling charge, and that way my customer helped pay for that custom packaging. And that's what I was saying. I put it up in the top in here, and I said, I will be having this professionally packed at ups. The nice thing about the handling within this this system is it doesn't split it out as a different cost in your shipping for etc. So what happens is they show it as just the flat, the full amount, so it wouldn't show you have $10 shipping and handling $15 shipping and handling. Now you may have products that require funky packaging. You may have products that you have to do something. Oh, if you're shipping food and you have a pack that you have to keep it cool, there's a 1,000,000 reasons why you could have a handling fee. You may put that in there. Just know that it's going to increase the cross to the shipping for your customer. That's your choice. I don't wait. Okay, This thing this is really where I am very good at this, because I have done it a lot. The actual weight of the item is £5.4.2 ounces. So the next increment is going to be £6 for me, and that is only 12 ounces away. So that would mean I would need it to be the box, which is length the my boxes 16 by 12 by eight. When you're getting started, you may want to go way the box. I know the box weighs itself about eight out eight ounces because it's a large box. It's just a certain amount of cardboard, and then I will be putting a lot of packing around it. I'm gonna be putting clean fill in there, which is Thebe paper, that clean paper. And so I know this is gonna The packing is going away more than 12 ounces. In this case, I'm going to make the cost of shipping based on £6. If I just did £6 it would actually still be in that £5 weight and one out a little bit. It could be a little bit more. It could be a little bit less now, in a case that it was considerably less. And I have had this. I just had a fellow not that long ago, where they charged him $42 for shipping and it costs 2017 20. I've refunded him the difference. And I'll show you how you can go ahead and do that in a different video when you choose your destination. I usually choose Chicago every time, so I can kind of see it. This is realistic. $15.75 to ship a book that weighs that much is pretty good. I don't think anybody is gonna have a problem with that. Shipping him out now, watch. If we had taken that off. It's $18. It's not that bad. I will tell you occasionally. Let's see what it's to Los Angeles. It's 28 to Los Angeles without parcel Select, and it's 26 to Los Angeles with it. So it's not tremendously different, but it does. It does actually help them a little bit, and this is kind of neat. What I have found is when I go to ship things out, I really do check. So when I get this and I get there, parcel Select Ground because we get a discount with the etc. Shipping. Occasionally, I'm able to ship it out to them priority for the amount that they've paid for shipping, which is wonderful. Then you have your insurance included. Then you have your tracking. Then you get it faster. There's nothing wrong with doing that. And in that case I usually send him a little message. And I say, Hey, the shipping was just believe it more for priority. So I went ahead and upgraded you. That's gonna help with your feedback that's gonna help with them being happy. Customers say it did take nine days, and with priority it took to they're gonna be so much happier, not emailing me nuts conv owing me saying, Where's my box? It There's a ton of great things that happened, So always check and see if the priority is close to the amount that they have paid for it. So that's it. That's mailing something super heavy. I know this one was a little bit longer, but there's more to go on when it could go very wrong. If I was to put £5 I'm shipping internationally and I couldn't get the box weight down, I could wind up upside down 20 or $30 on shipping. And so it's worse it to take a little bit of time if you're going to be shipping, having things to really figure out some of these different bits of the shipping input. So hopefully that helps Terry Jacobson marketing artfully
8. Setting Up Shipping Profiles: Now we're gonna talk about shipping profiles and this is great if you are a handmade seller and you sell a lot of the same things. Even as a vintage seller, I sell a lot of little metal pencil sharpeners that fit in this certain size box, and they always weigh about the same amount. I could set up a shipping profile for them. And I will tell you in all sincerity, if you're gonna be using the etc apt to do this, it's gonna change your life. If you're using the shipping profiles instead of trying. Teoh, put all this stuff in on your phone, and it's really easy to set up. So there's two ways you can do it. You can do a This is my somewhere, Dele, Guys, listings that we already did for the lightweight one. But you could come in here and you could say save as a shipping profile and then you would name the profile so I would name this maybe lightweight first class United States and international right, cause it's got all the things that you have. The nice part about it is I never shipped to Africa. I never shipped to Europe now, and so you could instead of having to keep going back and doing all that. So let's let's call this lightweight first class international Inter hints and us right? And so that would cover that. We're gonna say create profile and my profile has been saved. Now, the nice thing about that is, when you come here, the next time, you're gonna be able to just check that off and it you don't have to do anything but put in the weight and put in the box size and butter being you're out the door. It is a very, very handy tool. Toe half is calculated, costs you can you can edit it, you can go in when you first get started doing this kind of thing, you're probably gonna be going. Oh, what is this? You can go in and edit it. You can change it. But I will tell you that in the app it is going to be such an easy way for you to be able to go in and do your shipping really quickly. Okay, There is another way to do this. You're going to go to settings you're going to go to shipping settings and then you're going to come here. And if we renew this, if we know it's thinking about it, if we come in here and we dio and we look at it now, it's going to show it's really thinking hard. I have a lot of taps open. Sorry. So there it ISS so it goes across all of the difference places. It's gonna be in your settings. It's going to be in your listings. You can edit it, you can duplicate it. It's going to be on your phone up. So this is a really super little tip. If you're doing a lot of shipping of the same kind of item, hopefully that helps Sarah Jacobson working are clean.
9. Shipping Out - First Class: Now we're gonna ship out just something normal, Which for me is in the United States and its first class package service. You're gonna come to your open orders. You get here to here by here, and you're gonna say print, shipping, label, and then this is gonna pre load a lot of it. Now, there's a few things I like to check, and I'm going to say this more than once because I've had to learn this lesson more than once. You want to check and make sure this address matches on file with the USPS now, occasionally it won't. And if I can find one of those, I will. But usually if it doesn't match, it's going to say a different street number. Or maybe not a different street number, but a different street, like they wrote S t R E T. And the Postal Service likes S t right. That's not exactly a wrong address. The person has put their address incorrectly, according to them. But that's something to really look at every time you're shipping something out. All right, so now we're gonna come here, We're gonna say USPS first class package service, and then I am sending it in a package or a thick envelope. Hang on one second. I'll see what I'm shipping out. Went over to where I store my tools, artists, tools that I'm gonna shit about. And I actually have two of them. I have one with a brown handle and one with a black handle that says to a CH So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to go and open up another tab and I'm going to make sure and I do this a lot. The thing that can mess you up the most is if you send somebody the wrong item. So I know I have two of these. It could be either one sorting the vacuumed orders and we're gonna look and I'm gonna click on the item now, and it's actually the brown. So we're gonna make sure to send him the brown. Okay, so for sure, it's gonna be the brown one, and it is going to go out in a box Now. What I dio is I have already weighed this. I have already mentioned it. I've already kind of said what kind of box I'm going to put it in. But I like to go and package up everything all at once, and so I'm going to go do the measurements for this. Put it in the box. I'll bring it back. I'll show you how I package it, and then you can see if it changes or not. Sometimes it changes a little bit. So hold on. I'll be right back. Yea, I'm back and I have packaged up that little scraper and this is what it looks like. What I do is I have it wrapped in bubble wrap. That's one of the things we're going to talk about that you absolutely need. I use a business card from Mr Print. They're very cheap and so I can make him very inexpensively. I'll make sure to put a copy of this in the information for the class, but it offers 10% off. It gives my phone number, and then it gives my email address. Now I do know a lot of people who get very nervous about this. They would rather they contacted them through a convo. They kind of try toe Teoh, insist on that, and I think when etc was more insular. When, when it wasn't It didn't have guessed Loggins and it didn't have studio and it didn't have all those things. I think it was a lot easier to be able to to rely on the fact that people knew how to convo you an etc. I want to hear about any problems my people have. I can make anything right. I can help them with anything if I know about it. But if I don't know about it at all, then there's nothing I can do about it. So I try to make sure they can reach me at any time Now we're gonna go ahead and mail this this these mailers. So I put this in a pink mailer. It's just a bubble mailer. I have a thing with pink. That's the branding of my shop. And so that IHS nine, my six by one, and it actually turned out to be four inches. Okay, so the estimated cost was to 77. It actually turned out to four inches, so it's about 16 cents lower. I don't refund shipping to anybody until it gets over about two bucks, because I dio make sure that it shipped beautifully. I use a lot of wrapping materials. I don't expect them to pay for it. And as you saw when we were setting up the shipping, I try to make sure that it's very, very honest. I don't list an item for lower and then make the shipping higher. I try to make sure that the shipping that's going to be included that they pay for is the right amount. I will tell you occasionally I'm like, Holy sh Molly's. I can't believe how much they charge them for shipping. And then I will refund that and I will show you how to refund shipping, of course. So package waiters, four ounces on first class. You're not going toe. Have insurance, right? They will track the they will track it. They will send your customer tracking notice. They will track the package. They will do the post the delivery confirmation for that. What they mean is that they will. The post office will scan it when it's delivered, and then there's no insurance. So because this is only a $14 item, I'm not gonna pay for insurance. I guess I could show you. So I think it was 14. 99. Okay, so my insurance would be 80 cents. And honestly, if this gets lost in the mail, I can take the hit. Now, I will, uh, ensure things that are more expensive just because I I don't want to lose that entire amount of income. I just had one that that I did have to claim the insurance on. It was broken in transit. It looked like the box had been smushed. And thank goodness I had that insurance, but it was on 100 $49 item, not on a $14 item. Then all we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and say, confirming by and they're gonna say we're gonna put this to your etc Bill. And that's fine, because that's how they do it. So now you get to this field, and if you click print shipping label, it's gonna pop up a new windows so you don't have to stress out your imprint, a shipping label, and you're gonna print a packing slip. Okay, thinking, thinking, thinking. So I have my printer. I have a really cool printer and I haven't set up, so I have two different trays now. You definitely don't need that to start, but I can print my labels out of one tray and then I print my packing slips out of another tray. So we're gonna go ahead and say this and then I switch back to this and that's gonna print out both of those forms that we need now, a couple things that I've heard that are kind of fun. Tips are you can put us, Ah, heart or a circle on this and for for people to know that you have a coupon. This is done through the shipping interface. You can set that up. You can I always write in marker. Thanks, Terra. And I always think maybe I should say thanks to them, but I always just say Thanks, Terra. And then I put a smiley pace and I always send them a packing slip. Two reasons for that. First off, I get to make a smiley face for them. Let them feel like I care. And second off, if the package ever gets damaged and the materials fallout, or if the package or the label gets damaged and they don't know where to send it, the at the person's address is gonna be here. you can't see it cause I haven't linked out, but the person's address will be there, so post office can see where it was supposed to go. Here's my strong way. There's my thanks, terror. And then I just pulled that up and I put it in. And then I also put the label on the front, and I'm lucky my Post lady will come right to my house. So I'm just gonna pop this outside. That is how easy it is to ship through the United States Postal Salt Service using first class Man. It's not fancy. It's for light, low cost items. It's only for items under a pound. You get over a pound, you have to go to priority mail. We'll talk about that, too, of course. And hopefully that helps terror Jacobson marketing artfully
10. Shipping Out - Priority Mail: today we're gonna dio a priority Mail and priority mail is the one where you can actually make the most difference in the cost of shipping. So I'm going to show you things that you want to look for when you're doing priority mail. And it's fun. This gal actually didn't need priority mail. She could have ordered these two little items via regular mail, But it seems like maybe she needs toe have them quickly. So we're gonna go ahead and get those out to her today. So the first thing you wanna do, say, print, shipping label and we're here at the priority mail, we're gonna just move this up once, and now we see all the options that we have. So the wait is actually 15 out so she could have done first class, but she chose priority. Now, let's go ahead and see what our options are. So this is US Priority mail. See, right here us priority milk and I can choose a package or a thick envelope, so that could just be my I went and grabbed a seven by seven by six that would be able to hold that, and that's a regular priority mail box. That is not the actual flat rate box, right? So let's see what happens if we say then. So this one is $6.86. Let's actually take this down a little bit. It was only about 12 ounces altogether, actually, so it could be 6 86 Okay, so that didn't change anything for us. So let's go ahead and put this back up to 15 ounces. Now let's look at what else we can dio so we can say, Let's try it in a So sometimes you want to a flat rate padded envelope occasionally when the weight is heavy, that would make a big difference. I could probably find a box or do my. It might fit in my nine by three by six box that I could cut that a little bit. But I am not going to do that today. We could do a It wouldn't fit in a small box so we could try it in a medium box who that's not good. That put us up to $12.40. Now every single thing you ship in a medium box will be $12.40 which is great. Sometimes sometimes I could really save your bacon if you're shipping it very far away and it's heavy. I'm shipping this to Connecticut. I'm in Florida, so it is a number of regions away from me. But it's not. We don't want to do medium. And this is another reason why when people say you know, you should ship everything in priority, it isn't always the best answer. Okay, now this is where we really can start to see if anything's going on. So Priority box Regional Box a 9 19 and what the A's and the B's are. I talked about this in the priority mail video. They're going to give you discounts based on how far away you go. So regional A is the smaller size boxes that if this was in, if this lady lived in, let's say, um, Georgia instead of Connecticut, then we could absolutely maybe save some money or if she lived even in Florida, where I live, that could really save us some money using a regional box. Let's see what the regional be does and who the regional bees. Even worse, because the regional and the regional be and the flat rate tend to help you with heavier items rather than lighter items. So if you're trying to ship something heavier, this is later than priority, right? But what you want to do is if you think if you're really cognizant of where they're going, if it's going to California that I just don't even worry about it, it's not gonna like doing the A's. The bees isn't gonna help if it's not super heavy, flat rate isn't gonna help. But if I were to see that this was going to Tennessee, I might actually take a peek and see what's going on with this as far as it goes now, today I'm going to just send this in a seven myself. My six. We're gonna go ahead and do that package that got envelope. It's gonna ask me my weight. Seven by seven by six They always want this in the largest dimension, medium dimension, smallest dimension. So if it was 16 by 10 by four, you would say 16 by tens by four. All right. Yea so now we're gonna go ahead and click, confirm and by and this is going to go out today now. I just got the order today, so and she said she wanted it fast, so hopefully this will help her get it faster than if I said it on Monday because it's Friday. Remember, I have 1 to 2 business days. It's Friday. I could have mailed it out. Taken. Not today. Saturday, Sunday. Don't count because those were not business days. Monday would have rarely been my first business day, and I could probably reel it out as late as Tuesday. But that wouldn't be nice to her that, you know, that's kind of saying, OK, I'm going to do everything I can to get around shipping rather than I'm going to do everything I can to get this package to my customer, and I happened tohave time. Now I'm also super fortunate. My mail lady picks up on Saturday. Some of you might do that from your home, or you may have a post office locally that does Saturday, pick up to where I could have maybe done it Saturday. But I'm gonna go ahead and get this out of the way for my lady because she paid up for the priority mail. So I want to make sure she gets it past. So here's your shipping label and we have to print a packing slip, and that's it. Now I'm gonna go. I'll be right back and print these out and I'll be right back and show you the box to go. All right that are and voice print it out with my Thanks, Kara. I've got my blocks all dead, and I'll show you in just one second how that looks. So I have some clean fill smooshed up in the bottom there. And then I have my package that I did with bubble wrap and then tissue paper on the outside little sticker and then the card that we talked about so that they can feel comfortable when they get the item that they can contact me. And then just to be we better clean film Assad so they doesn't travel around in there, and that's it. That is how you do a priority. Mail. I This is my favorite priority mail box of myself in my six. If I get down toe fewer than five of these in the house, I'm start twitching because they are just the perfect size presenting my things out. So hopefully that helps Sarah Jacobson, marketing athlete
11. Shipping Out - International Order: So what are the things that I feel like from speaking in person with people that they're the most hesitant to do is to ship internationally? It just seems like that scary. And I can understand that almost any problem that you have say your weight is too heavy or your box got too big is compounded by having to ship overseas, right? And so a lot of times people will not ship overseas. And I feel like as long as it's to a country that has been very good at getting my packages , receiving them, not having to pay a tax, I'm willing to ship almost anywhere. Last week I shipped to Canada. I ship the Hong Kong. This week I'm shipping to Australia. So it's not hard, and the thing about international shipping is that their first class goes up to £4 and a lot of people get really weird and say, Oh, I can't do international because the shipping costs too much. If you look at this, the price of the item was 29 99 the shipping was 33 75. That's that's a lot, but if you are the type of person who is in Australia and you can't get the items that they're looking for. Then there there used to paying that. Okay, that's not unheard of. And the thing to think about is like my husband. It's so funny. I do all my shopping months in advance. I will have anything that I need to order online shipping. Probably done by cyber Monday, right? Because I want to make sure there's plenty of time for things to come and that my husband has no problem paying as much for shipping as he does for a night. Um, so just because you would be horrified to pay more for shipping than you would do for an item doesn't matter. When you set up your things, just go ahead and put your shipping in there. So if you see here, you can kind of get an idea what's going on right from this screen. So we're doing USPS first Class International Package Service, and that's fine. And now we're gonna go ahead and bring a shipping label. Excellent. And I actually sold for really pretty heavy heavy. They're pretty heavy candleholders that are silver plate. Not not regular silver, but silver plate. And so I'm gonna be boxing those up, and I'm going to show you how you fill out the customs forms because that is almost the easiest part. Let me go ahead and get those boxed up and make sure I have all the dimensions correctly and I'll be right back. I'm back. Get a dog here this time. And the thing that I said could happen with international shipments happened. Well, I went ahead and I got a 10 by 10 by 10 box, and that's pretty big. It's a pretty big square box, and I went and filled it and they actually fit in the base of the box. I didn't have to use really any of the height of the box. And so I used the clean fill in the top and come to find out it was £3 and three or four ounces, which would have kicked me into a whole nother price range. So let's do if we do £3 so right now it's 32 06 The ladies paid for that, So if we get a £3.3 ounces, it's 48 21 so I would be about $18 upside down. So I'm really needed to get that closer to that £2.10 ounces that I thought it was gonna be right. So what I did was instead of using a 10 by 10 my 10 I went and got a It's about a 10 by six by, let's say nine right, and I'm reusing a box. I know a lot of people I personally, by boxes a lot. I like the convenience for me of doing that, and I ship a lot, so it would be kind of kerfuffle. Lee. If I was trying to scavenge all the boxes for my business, I'd have a nervous breakdown. But I don't have every single size, and my packing is really nice. You've seen it. It's the pink, and I wrap everything very nicely in bubble wrap, and I make sure of a little tissue paper. And then I make sure to cover anything that says my husband's or my contact information. So it doesn't confuse the post office with the stickers, but it's fine to use nice recycled materials. Don't use something that's all that comes to your house, all beat up and then send it out to them will beat up not only because it doesn't look good , but because the integrity of the box has been hurt. And whatever you're shipping in, it may get hurt too. So is good news. When I did that, I got it down to £2.9 ounces, which was exactly where we thought it was gonna be when I estimated it. And as we talked about in the setting up your listing for shipping, the way I do that is I usually add a certain amount of weight somewhere between maybe three and nine ounces for shipping materials. So I didn't write. I just didn't I didn't write for the pieces. I just couldn't get it to fit with the 10 by 10 by 10. So I went with a little bit smaller box. Now, one of the reasons why you have tohave 10 inches on the side is this is called a dispatch note and envelope packaging. And this is what you put your customs forms in. And you get that from the post office for free, and that is literally at a piece of paper folded in half. It's exactly in here, so I'm going to show exactly what we have to do for this because I know that international shipping freaks people out, and that is the only difference. So don't get nervous. The first I got my It's a first class international package. They can't check the address overseas, so that's kind of a bummer. I'm right at the price that she paid to ship. Maybe a buck less, but that's good. £2.9 ounces. It's only a $30 product, $29 product. Let's see how much shipping is gonna be So they won't refund me the shipping if there's a problem, which is half of the thing, so be a dollar 35 for me to pay for ship, ship, ship insurance. And I don't really, you know, for $30. That's kind of not worth it. I probably wouldn't turn in week anyways, because I want to make sure that on the really big items that I have that coverage, and if I was turning in a ton of little items, they would probably not insure me anymore. I could get in trouble, or, I don't know, a lot of people have have things to say about that but for me, I really don't ensure until it gets over about $50 I'm shipping in a way that's not priority mail, Right? Has priority mail. They'll do in the United States to 104 international. I believe it's 2 200 so that's really good. Okay, The description. This is a very basic idea, so they know what's in the box. So think about it. I'm going to say four vintage handle holders. Okay, four vintage candleholders. That is exactly what it iss. I never lie. There's people, especially in international. There's a lot of problems in Europe with the VAT tax, and what they'll do is they will ask you to say, gift that it's that I'm sending a gift. I'm not sending a gift. They It's a commerce transaction. And so I do not want to be a person who I won't be a person who lies and says, Oh, it was a gift. It's not a gift. I am getting paid for it, so I won't do that, And I've had people ask me to do that, and I've just said No, I don't really do that and they're fine with it. or I have heard people that have had a new order canceled because they wouldn't do that. And I'm fine with that, too. I'll just sell my item to somebody else Now. We're good. We have this. We have this. I don't need a new label for this order. That would be if I need a second box for the same order than the tracking would go together . But I'm good. Oh, I forgot to tell you about this last time, so this is very cool. This is a note. You can just go in here and change it. I say thank you so much for your order or hope you love it. If you have any questions, I give them my email address, and I have had some people email me beforehand and, uh, either ask questions or just say thanks. And that's awesome for me. I love that they can contact me in a manner that works for them. And so now I'm just going to say confirm, and by that's gonna put, ah, $32.6 on to my bill, miss a purchase. And now, see, let's look at this shipping label. This is a little different. This is not our normal sticky shipping label. These air just gonna go on pieces of paper. And what you want to do is you want to print four copies of these, So we're gonna say four copies of these and we're gonna say print and then I also want my normal package slip packing slip, and I'm gonna say print just one copy of that. So that's coming up. And we're just gonna say Prince, and then I'm gonna go grab those off the printer and these just go on regular plain old paper and what you want to do is you want to fold him in half. I don't know if it makes a difference. I fooled them all separately. There's been times when I've been super busy and I've just folded them all at once. And that doesn't seem to be a big deal. I don't know. My post office lady didn't say anything about it, so it's no big deal. Every once in a while, I get free keys like which copy is that there's no copies. I just printed four of the same copy of the same thing, right? So they're all the same. Now there's just one other thing that you really need to know about and let me show it to you On here, right here. Sender, signature and date. So it's in the bottom left hand corner, and what they want you to do is they want you to sign it and date it on each of the copies . So now I have all my little mailing labels. I have them all signed. And then I tend to put them into the the mailing label holder before I put it on the box because it makes it stiffer, and it makes it a little bit easier to Dio. And all you're gonna do is you're just gonna squish it in their squish, squish, squish any bit kerf awfully. But it goes right and it's not any big deal. Then you would take the back, stickies off and just stick it on your box. And that is the entire difference between shipping internationally and shipping for United States shipment is that instead of using a label, you print out four of the customs forms. Now what happens with those is that it's going to goto custom officer, and they're going to say, Oh, I see here there's four vintage candleholders. They might scan it. They might weigh it. Don't mess with international shipping, Get the weight right. But in general, I have shipped so many packages overseas, and I've not had any trouble at all every once in a while since its first class. It's gonna take, You know, I like to tell them between four and six weeks. Many times it's shorter than that, but that's a really good estimate. So 4 to 6 weeks, and especially around the holidays, don't let them order from you if they're on a timeline and ship it first class international, because that is really the slow way to ship. So hopefully that helps Terry Jacobson marketing our fleet.
12. Refunding Shipping Overages: if you have a case where etc charge somebody a lot of shipping more than they should have. So for me, I tend to do over a dollar or a couple of dollars. If it's if they charged, um $62 it was $60 I don't worry about it. But if they charge them $62 it was $45 I will credit them the difference on the shipping amount. And as you can see here, I just cover up everybody's address. So what we're gonna do is you're gonna come to. So if I was going to refund Don his the shipping over it, you're gonna go and you're going to click on receipt and then you're gonna say, Manage, order, issue a refund. And the nice thing is, here you can put in shop owner re funding shipping over ridges, and this is a message to your buyer. So here always say something like, Hi, Don, because they're going to get this as a buyer. Hi, Don. Just wanted to let you know I was refunding your shipping. It was overcharged to you. Now I do know that this makes a huge difference to people. Just recently, I had that that same shipping over problem. I actually refunded the shipping to the gentleman. And I thought everything was great. You got the package? It had actually been hurt. And he was really wonderful. A Sfar as helping me with the insurance and all of that. And I think a big part of that was the fact that I had re funded his shipping over and above that beforehand. So doing this can really help people. What? You're gonna skip this part cause you're not refunding them Any amount of the refund. If you didn't need to do a regular refund, you could just say issue a full refund. But I'm just gonna be re funding in this example the difference in the amount. So say the shipping costs was only $2. The amount difference would be 1 39 And you would just say that and you would say, review refund. I am not going to do that because I don't want to refund any money to this gentleman. The shipping cost was correct, but you just say review refund, and it is going to give them some money back. If you don't see it come up. If you just click in a different box, you're gonna get that. And they will, um, fix some of your processing fees. They're gonna fix some of your transaction fees if that even accounted for it. It is a really nice thing to do, but I always let him know I did it. It's it's they will send them a message. But I really like to let people know that I am the kind of cellar that is honest and truthful and willing to work with my clients. So hopefully that helps Taraji Gibson forgetting her plea.
13. Sending To A Different Shipping Address: for this video. We're just gonna talk you and me about should you change the mailing address for a package ? So there's a couple of things going on here. First off, if you ship to the address on file and it gets returned, you are safe. You could issue a refund and not include the shipping and etc. Will side with you the person put in the wrong address. I know as a fact, this has happened to me. When we moved, I put in the wrong address for something and I knew I did it. So I had no problem paying the shipping, trying to track down my packages, things like that. But as an Etsy seller, you're gonna need to make a decision about whether you do this or not. I do 100%. We're not 100%. Let's talk about that. So what will happen is you will get a message that says, Oh my gosh, I should I put the wrong mailing address? Will you ship it to here instead? You can do a few things in this circumstance. You can check and see have they, like, look at their profile, see what they've been favored in. You can all, honestly almost see what they've been shopping for. So if you're selling them a piece of jewelry and they've been looking at a bunch of jewelery shops and you can tell that they're a person, you can see that they've been on Etsy for a while or they're just a guest. You can tell a little bit about them. Go ahead and change it now. You will not necessarily be covered under Etsy's guaranteed seller program. It does. It makes things a little bit more complicated. I find that I tend to want to work in generosity rather than fear, and so I have no problem with it. I also have. There's a place where they can say it's a gift and then they can give you a different address. There's many reasons why people would want to have a package sent to an area that isn't theirs. I mean, gosh, there's even times when I'm, you know, at my dad's house for a couple weeks, and I know I'm gonna be up there and I want something for him. All shell ship to a different mailing address than my credit card on file or ask them to ship to a different place. Some people say they should have asked you before they ordered, and that's true. But most shoppers aren't that sophisticated. They're They're They're just like, why wouldn't you ship it somewhere else? Let's talk about why you wouldn't ship it somewhere else. If somebody steals a credit card and they order something and the credit card has an address and they want to ship it somewhere else to a post office box to something like that , I would say that I am way more likely to ship something to a different address. If it's going to a home like, why would you steal a credit card and have it shipped to your home? Then I would to a P o box. Then it sort of starts to get a little bit funnier to where you're going. Okay, why would you want this ship to a post office box instead of to a home address? And you have every right? If you do decide that you don't want to ship it to a different address, you have every right to go in and hit, give him a full refund and walk away that's not a problem. That's something that you can dio. I feel like I'm the message boards. You're gonna find a lot of talk about this. People who are just adamant that you should never change the mailing address, that everybody's trying to scam you and that it that it it's something's horrible's gonna happen. You will also find a lot of people like me who are just sure I'll be happy to do it. It's whatever answer you decide and then kind of make it a status for your store. So you don't have to think through every single one. I know for sure most of the time I'm going to do it. It's not a bother. It doesn't scare me. You just go in and I don't have any I've mailed out today. But on the list things underneath where I said make sure to always check your just gonna hit at it and then edit the address to a different address. So hopefully that helps terror. Dickinson marketing sharply
14. Paying Your Bill Ahead Of Time: one of the things that's my least favorite about etc. Is that they accumulate all your shipping costs over the month, and then they charge it to you with your monthly bill. So, for example, I shipped out something today that was $32.32 dollars, and they they will pay me for it today. But they'll put the amount cost of that shipping on a bill and then bill me later in the month. So that kind of washes it out, right there's not. It's not like there's anything happening that's incorrect. I just don't want to have to pay a bill unless I have to. So what I'm gonna dio and this is kind of a little sneaky trick. And you can do this no matter what. If you go to your finances and you look at your bill, so this is my bill. Finances is my bail, and my bill right now is 37 31. But I don't go in from my payment accounts. You can see how much money you have in your payment account. I have $184 but I have $169 available so I can come in here and go toe finances and say, Pay my belt. Right. So I'm gonna go ahead and pay that bill. I'm gonna say, make a manual payment, and then it will say, Do you want pay the whole bill? And yes, I do want to pay a bill. Ah, it will ask if you want to do it. You know, Do you want to do it with your credit card? Do you want to do it with pay power? I guess that would be really nice to if you're used to using PayPal or if you have a lot of money in your PayPal account, you don't want your bill to go to your credit card at the end of the month. You can absolutely do it that way. But I could just use my bouts. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. Now it may sit. I have I have made a number of payments over the course of the month. I do this almost every Sunday, and then if I have any big sales on Monday or big shipping sales, even I will try to do it. They usually send you your last week's Monday on Monday. Mine usually comes and I'm eastern time around. Um, I usually see the notification about three o'clock, so generally there's plenty of time for me to do my shipping and then go ahead and make sure that Bill doesn't get rolled over. Now what I did the first month I did this, I didn't really find this out till they end of the month. And it was It was hard because I did not have enough money in my payment account to pay that whole bill. So then it did go to my credit card. But now I know that every Sunday I just go in and I pay my bell manually and then that way I don't usually I get a tiny bill on my credit card for etc. But in general, instead of having a so these are my bills 400 500 At Christmas time, it was close to 1000. I don't want Teoh have that that go into my system when I can pay it right up front and get it taken care of. So hopefully that helps. I think that was a neat little trick. I can't remember where I learned it or I would so credit them. It was on a wonderful etc forum where they said, Oh, just pay your bill ahead and I was like What? You can pay your bill ahead so hopefully that helps terror Jacobson marketing artfully.
15. Final Thoughts!: there you have it all kinds of information about shipping on, etc. Having done this talk and talking about shipping with people in person, I know that it is super scary. I teach classes on getting started on etc. And if we have an hour and 1/2 I bet you we do an hour on shipping and they would go the whole entire time. So if you're getting started, or if you were confused before, hopefully this has really helped you to get an idea of what to do. Couple things I wanted to say at the very end. Number one. If you make mistakes and you will occasionally don't be sat, just take it as a learning experience. Get over at and know that you'll do better next time. There was times when I made a mistake and I went up not making any money, and there was at least one time I can think of that. I made a mistake and I owed money, which is really sad, but I don't do that anymore. It hasn't happened to me in a very long time, and I'm much better at shipping, so just get started, figure it up number two the easy way to do things. So I know a few gals who insist that they have to take their packages to the post office because then they know they get scanned. My mail lady is amazing, and she's she will not put something on her truck without scanning it. You may have great mail, lady of a great mailman. You may terrible, but try all of your options before you just out of hand, reject them. You may live in the city where you can't put your mail out or you would have to put it in the lobby and hope that nobody took it. But if you have options, see what they are her You could do it the way you want to do it. If you want to set your shipping time for next day and you think that will help you get sales and you can do it easily, that's fine. If you want to say to yourself, I'm only gonna ship twice a week. So you put that in your shop policies that you're gonna ship on Mondays and Thursdays. You can operate your store in any way that you want. Number four order your supplies online. I know that a lot of the ladies when I'm in the classes teaching have said, but I know they have those supplies at my post office. I can just go to the post office and get him, or I know I would rather go to Wal Mart and get my bubble wrap, then toe have to order it online. I don't like to order things online. It is. If this is gonna be part of your business, it is so much less expensive to order supplies online for the shipping supplies and then the priority mail supplies. You may not have the option of every single kind of box that you want to get at your post office. It just depends what they have sitting out front. So just try to start ordering those online. And once you do it once, you'll be like, Oh, okay, this was super easy. And last but not least, thank you so much for taking my class. I know that it's scary to open up a shop. It's scary to consider shipping internationally, and I hope that this has helped to If it has, could you leave me a review. Those really help me to be able to know that people are enjoying the content I produce and so that I make more videos here on still share. And last but not least, let me know about your store if you there's an area in community where you can leave me a link to your store, or if let me know if you open a store. One of the things that I always tell everybody is open a store, try it and see what happens. So I hope my hope for you is that you open a store and you sell some things and have lots the ship, Terry Jacob said, marketing artfully.
16. UPDATE Etsy Package Preferences: So I just wanted to make you a real quick video here today because I noticed something amazing in etc. And this is gonna be a game changer. So you know how he always had these drop downs packaged thick envelope, flat rate envelope, whatever. Now we can make our own package dimension. So for me, I use a priority seven by seven by six a lot. And so now if I put that in, it's going to show that and it changes the dimensions for me. If I dio I do. First class seat by six by four or priority eight by six by four Because sometimes my stuff doesn't fit in the seven by seven. I don't want to use a weird size box. Um but look, it just dumps the package dimensions right in there. You can make your own. So if you wanna make a new one, just say at a package dimension I would say, um six by by four by four Make my dimension six by four by four saves Done. And then I don't have Teoh do it over and over. Yea, like this good carried Jacobson marketing artfully
17. UPDATE New Shipping Interface (Mar 2018): Terry Jacobson marketing artfully Today Is an Amazing day, cause etc. Updated the workflow of our shipping. And I think this is gonna be life changing for handmade sellers. For vintage sellers like me, it's gonna be really good for craft supplies. Excellent for digital. It doesn't really affect us because as soon as somebody gets in order, it's fulfilled. They send the digital copy. So for if you're shipping a physical product, this is an amazing, amazing overview that of what they've done for us. This is an order that I have. So we're going to start at the order level and things that have changed. Now I get a little pop up that gives me all the information in one place. First off, I can say I always do new because I ship out right away. But for you, handmade sellers or if you have a if you're doing any work on it, you know that you need it to be in progress. You can make this in progress and then show all of your in progress orders. After that, you would market complete, so that's gonna help your workflow. I know that there are a lot of handmade sellers that have hundreds of orders and kind of managing. That is Ah, hard one. These other actions that you can dio you could print out this order, which I know a lot of the girls dio they'll print out their orders. They'll put it, you know, kind of in a sleeve with the item that they're doing update ship by date. This is great if I have a perfect example for this. I ordered a planner cover from a lady who had a pretty long time that she was going to do it. But as soon as I ordered, she said, I was just getting ready to update my order time. It's going to be about 10 weeks instead of six weeks. Is that buying for you? And so, yes, I just said, Absolutely. That's fine for me. The nice thing is here you could update it at update issue a refund if they don't want the updated ship date. So that's awesome. And then on Marcus gift, the only thing on my end that really happens when somebody hasn't marked as a gift is you don't get the pricing and the detail on the page that prints out the oh shoot. Of course, I can't remember what it's called right now with a packing slip, and that is something I wouldn't do because I wouldn't want to accidentally forget and send it in here. We have the information about our seller. Of course, that's covered up. It also shows what kind of package it has, So this is Parcel Select Ground. It's about £3.15 ounces. And then I would print Pope Bush here to go to the regular old shipping label maker area. That is an overview of your detail. Now let's talk about managing all your orders at once. This, I think, is amazing. So you have overdue ones that will show up here if you have a long order. Q. You could definitely target the ones that are overdue. Make sure there's get up this. I think it's fun because when you click on today, you see the ones that have to go out. Today I have two days, 1 to 2 days set on my shipping time today. The first order was done on Thursday, so that would mean I would have Friday and Monday to ship it. The 2nd 1 was actually ordered today, which is Friday. Which would mean I would have Monday and Tuesday because they don't count Saturday and Sunday is shipping dates. I won't have anything today or tomorrow. I could absolutely ship them out today or tomorrow, which I'm gonna be shipping them as soon as I get done making this video. But then I could look at all of the ones that are available within a week, and those are going to be doing that. And then we have our no estimate, which is I guess if you put a very extended shipping time or you are waiting for something , maybe you're waiting for something back from your buyer. That could be a reason for that. I love this destination, United States or international. The reason why I would like this is my little printing out. Um, my borders, what I do is I take a screen capture of these orders and I print them out. And then two copies. The first copy I cut in half, right cutting. However many pieces, the orders are. And when I package the item, I put it up with the item. So the Now I know that this is this item. It works especially well when I have a lot of little packages and they're all the same size . But they have different things. So the person's order goes on a slip right by them. And on the other one, I'll mark down the weight and the dimensions and I'll circle this. This didn't used to be handy like this. To show it. I used to have to write in. It was priority mail, and that way you can absolutely kind of keep track the orders process a whole bunch of them at once. I love that now Back to the United States and international. It's it's not harder to ship International. You just have to print out your labels a little differently. But I am super careful to make sure on my international orders that I'm getting it as close to that. What I've estimated as possible give you an example. Say, I'm sending a bowl and it is a silver bowl so it could be damaged in the mail, but most likely won't be. I could put it in a little bit smaller box with a lot of room for it and pay less an international as opposed to maybe in the United States. I might have put it in a little bit bigger box with a little bit more Patty not say that I would pack it worse, but I may decide to use peanuts in it. That would really, um, you know, cushion it as opposed to using more, more rap that would maybe make it bigger, right? International. All the problems that you have with your weight or your dimensions are going to be exponential. So if I'm sure a little bunch of and I ship a fair amount of international, If I was shipping international, I would print I would screen capture those and do those. And then I would screen capture the United States so that I could kind of keep them separate the channels at Sea and Etsy Studio at Sea Studio is going to be the ones for our friends that sell craft supplies. So you may Actually I'm not sure why that would make a difference. It doesn't make a difference in my business, but it may make a difference in yours. That toggle is there and then eligible for etc. Shipping. I'm not sure what eligible for etc. Shipping means, um and and see how they're keeping our options here. You could undo these options and be able to get right back to it. Let's go back, Teoh. All OK, so my Norn etc studios. That's about what I can see as the updated. This one was marked as a gift. So I need to make sure to be very careful with that. Other than that, everything looks real good. I love this new interface you would have. Oh, here's your in progress. So if you had marked a whole bunch years in progress, I don't have that cause I'm vintage. But for the handmade it hand made sellers, that would probably really be really good. I love this new interface. I hope you do, too. Terra Jacobson, marketing our fleet.
Tara Jacobsen, Nerdy but fun marketing tips & tricks!
