First of all I want to thank everyone that replied to my previous EBay thread. Your responses where all very helpful. This time, however, I have a very specific question with regards to selling on EBay. What would you recommend doing if, say, you were selling an item on EBay and someone sent you an email asking you to quote them a lower price on shipping for the item you are selling. Please keep the following in mind:
The price I set for shipping is kinda high, relative to other similar items.
However, the shipping materials for this item aren’t exactly cheap. The item is large and heavy and requires special static-free shipping material which is kinda expensive.
Reducing the shipping charges (however its done, if at all) may encourage others to bid higher on the item.
All things told, I could probably stand to reduce the shipping charges by about $20 without it hurting too much.
So based on all of this what would you recommend I do? (BTW, this is my first time selling on EBay, so any advice is welcome.)
I would recommend lowering the shipping charge. But only by what you said. You could do it without hurting. I have passed up auctions many times because I thought the shipping was too high. I understand that sometimes you NEED to has a high shipping charge because its neccessary to cover the materials. But I also know that buying a sticker does not require a $5 shipping charge.
How have you calculated your shipping? - is it based on actual cost including materials (and possibly time, effort and other expenses)? - if this is the case, then the buyer is expecting you to subsidise the shipping out of your profit, which I would describe as unreasonable.
Why pander to the unreasonable demands of someone who hasn’t even placed a bid yet?
Nowadays if I find someone’s attitude (very)unreasonable, I block their bids - I don’t need that sort of business.
When I used to buy a lot from Ebay, I would notice that a lot of sellers would put some profit into the shipping charges. I know how much packaging cost and it wasn’t enough to reach their shipping “and handling” charge. The auction should determine the profit and the shipping cost should be just that. I’ll bet the bidder is trying to alleviate that.
When I used to sell tickets, I would calculate the costs exactly and include insurance. I had someone write me once and say that they didn’t want to pay my high shipping, so I gave them some shipping options (including without insurance at their own risk), and told them that if they won the auction, they only had to pay the bid price plus their shipping option cost. They didn’t win the auction, so it didn’t matter.
Actually, there’s very little, if any, profit in my shipping charges. If I were to lower it by $20 I would almost certainly be losing money on shipping. It was recommended to me that I have a fixed shipping price, so that people would know up front how much shipping would cost. So that’s what I tried to do. I got an estimate on how much it would cost to ship it to California (I live in NC) and went from there. I’m not sure how much it matters but the item already has a significant number of bids. So it’s not like the shipping is so high no one is bidding. Anyway, I really dont know how fair it is to offer reduced shipping to just the one bidder. It seems like if I am going to reduce it I should reduce it for everybody. That being said, how could I go about doing that? EBay won’t let you change the posted shipping once the auction starts.
I would much rather someone ask about shipping charges before they bid than after. If the person had already bid and then tried to dicker, it could create a bad situation. If I were you, I’d stick by the shipping cost you originally planned on, but if it comes out significantly less than your estimate, offer to refund the difference. And keep it in mind for next time. Shipping is hard to estimate (I know!), but taking a loss because you underestimated it sucks even worse.
I might be wrong on this, but I think when people say you should have a fixed shipping cost, they mean that you should have a single price for shipping across, say, the entire U.S., rather than a depends-on-the-state rate.
Anyway, it sounds to me like the person asking you to drop it is being cheap. The way I see it, if you’re not making any profit in your shipping charges, why consider reducing the cost and lose out financially? I could understand if there were no bids on your item, but that’s not the case here.
If your shipping charge is justified, I see no reason to change it. You could always drop it to your actual cost, of course, but IMO you shouldn’t drop it to a point where it’s eating into your sale.
Rather than try to change the shipping cost of this auction, I think you should instead consider it for the next time you put something up for sale. Leave this one alone. If that particular seller doesn’t like your terms, tough for him, and yay for the winning bidder who agrees to your terms. In general, I advise against giving special treatment to bidders who ask for price reductions. If you’re being reasonable, then you don’t have to make it your problem that they can’t accept your terms.
I recently bought a bicycle on Ebay and the shipper originally wanted like $100 for shipping. I didn’t say one thing about it and she just said she found a cheaper carrier. She saved me almost $50!!! Make sure you look into all of the carrier options, UPS, USPS, FedEx, etc and see if you can get a lower shipping cost. Believe me, when you save someone even $20, people will appreciate it and you will see it in your seller rating. But I wouldn’t lose money on the deal, just to HOPE that someone will bid higher.
I’m one of those buyers too. For example, right now I’m looking for a reasonably priced used copy of Simcity 4. Some people are charging $4 for standard shipping, others are charging $16 for standard shipping…that’s a little, well, obvious, isn’t it?