Cost effective shipping methods

AgentBryant

I've literally just starting listing some old textbooks on my Amazon account to sell, and within 30 minutes one of them has sold already. So I guess I need to get it shipped tomorrow as I'd like to get this started out right with positive feedback. I've never actually shipped a book before (or much of anything besides expedited documents), so I don't know the best way to go about this. I have $4 of shipping credit to work with and would prefer to keep it at that. Is USPS usually the better option as opposed to UPS or Fedex?

Skoal Cat

USPS, media mail, tracking and insurance.

locopostal

yeah for 4 dollars you're not going to get anything better than media mail with the addons. just keep in mind that it has a tendency to be pretty slow. If you want something faster, you could also try for a Priority Mail Flat-Rate box. if the book fits. the small flat rate boxes run about 5 bucks for shipping i think.

EggyToast

Skoal Cat wrote:

USPS, media mail, tracking and insurance.

This but I'd drop insurance; in my experience it's mostly a scam, since you need to file it with the Post Office and they will work very hard to get off the hook. Insurance is great for expensive items, but for anything under a few hundred, don't bother.

But definitely buy Delivery Confirmation and plug the number into Amazon, to confirm the shipment. What I do is actually use a food scale (the $20 Escali digital scale) as a postage meter, and then plug the weight into Paypal. Paypal has a "multi-order shipping tool" that lets you simply buy postage, and also see all of your pricing options. What's more, the price for Delivery Confirmation is included at $0.19, rather than the typical $0.80 charged at the PO. Then you can just drop the package off at the PO (and cut in line, woo).

Straygatsby

We sell all of our "dead" book inventory here via amazon, alibris, all that good stuff. With the paltry credit Amazon gives you (3.99 non-expedited) you're best bet is to toss it in a cheap mailer or box, take it to the post office, request media mail, and that's that. Delivery confirmation doesn't cost much, and it puts the buyer at ease, but be warned it's only a confirmation of delivery by the post office, not a confirmation of receipt by the buyer (if that book goes to a neighbor's house because your local mailman wasn't paying attention that day, delivery confirmation won't do much for ya). I wouldn't bother with insurance short of it being a 500 dollar textbook. =P