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hey everyone welcome back to the channel today we are going to talk about shipping shipping can get expensive if you're in a small business and you've uh been doing a lot of online sales you'll realize that shipping can really eat into your profits so today I'm going to give you five tips and you know what hang around if you go to the very end of this video um and I'm not saying jump to the end but uh hang around with us and I'll give you a couple of uh bonus suggestions at the end but we're going to focus today on five tips to help you save money and increase your profits when it comes to shipping let's get into [Music] it okay now real quick before we get into the five tips on shipping if you've had success or if you've learned a thing or two during your time in online shipping go ahead and uh jump down below and leave a comment let us know what you've learned over the course of your time in business now that we've got that covered let's get into these [Music] tips okay tip number one don't pay full price if you're walking into the post office with your package and you're walking up to the counter With No Label whatsoever and and you're giving it to them and you let them weigh it and then uh print out the label and pay you know the counter price you are spending too much uh my number one recommendation is don't play pay full price but the number one thing that you should do is get a shipping service now there are a bunch of them out there I have personally used shipping easy that's what I started with I have used pirate ship and now honestly since the bu bulk of my um online business is through Etsy I just use etsy's uh service now for example if I take a 9 in x 6 in x 2 in bubble mailer uh that weighs 8 oun and I just picked a place in North Dakota it's a little town called Wing North Dakota with a zip code of 58494 if I ship that via USPS it's going to cost me $6 if I go to shipping easy it will cost me $447 if I use pirate ship it will cost $447 now I can't manually input an address into Etsy unless I have an order so but just trust me I've checked them all out I think they all pretty much use the same commercial uh rate and in fact some a lot of my labels will say Pitney bows and if you remember back in the day that was a huge and maybe they're still around um they did the the little scales and and mailing systems um but I think they're all using about the same commercial rates so you're probably not you know one versus another I think you're going to pay about the same price but uh again number one get yourself a shipping service if you want more uh you know breakdown on that kind of stuff leave comments below and I can maybe do a little comparison on the different uh shipping services but in my experience they're all about the [Music] same all right the number two tip that I have for you today has to do with these guys right here the flat rate box now most of us know this these you can get for free from the post office there's a reason that they're free now this flat rate box it may be more expensive for you to use this in the long run yeah you're not paying for the box but you are paying an off a lot for shipping um if I go to the post office with this box and I have not used a shipping service and I just walk up to the counter it's going to cost me $10.20 uh to get a label and ship this via the US Postal Service now if I go to pirate ship and I get a label for it it's going to cost me $851 so I'm already saving almost $2 which is more profit for me if I use my shipping service to um use use these however unless what you are put in here is really heavy um you know up to uh probably about a pound 16 o after that this might be a more economical value but if you're shipping anything less than that you are probably paying way too much in postage for the use of this flat rate box so there's a time in place for these we'll talk about them a little later but uh most often take a look at uh you know other ways to ship [Music] the third tip that I have for you today is to pay attention to autoc calculated values now what do I mean by that well if you're like me and you have multiple products on a site like Etsy when somebody places an order for multiple item Etsy will tend to combine the values that you have entered for your products for example when I ship this product I know that it weighs about 3 oz and I ship it in a 9x6 uh bubble mailer like this with a sheet of bubble wrap now like I said weighs about 3 oz when I ship this product it's about the same now if you order both of these I can fit them both in the same bubble mailer but Etsy is going to say well they were both this you know Dimension and weight and it's going to come up with some 15 by 9 by something you know much bigger size and it's going to double the weight and everything they're trying to do me a favor but since I can put all of this in one package and it only really increases the weight by like maybe an ounce because a lot of the weight is just the packaging and bubble wrap Etc I know that I can ship this in the Same 9x6 by now maybe it's a 1in uh Dimension you know increase uh but it's only 4 oz so I can enter that and instead of paying $5 for shipping now I'm back down into the $400 range right so again by paying attention to that you can save your yourself some money and increase your [Music] profits tip number four four four yes tip number four buy in bulk now again when I first started out I was going to Walmart I was buying much smaller rolls of this bubble wrap I was charging appropriately um you know I was buying 10 packs of bubble mailers don't do that you make the investment it's going to cost you a little bit for example these poly mailers from Amazon is $49.99 for 250 that makes these things only 20 cents a piece and now it's very easy for me to calculate the cost so 250 of those 50 bucks no problem um the bubble wrap this massive box here uh $33.99 for 700 ft so I get two rolls of this takes me quite a while I think this is the second one in in a year I went through one box and I've started on uh my second box um I think this is the second roll of the second box so you know depending on how much you uh you ship um definitely it's going to save you money these are perforated into uh 12in squares and it's 12 in wide so each one of these sheets costs me 5 cents so again Buy in [Music] bulk and now for the fifth tip the fifth tip get a scale don't rely on the post office now the post office scale is the scale that rules but it's important for you to have a pretty good idea of how much to pay when you're buying your shipping labels if if you're just guessing then you have you run the risk of overpaying now I went on Amazon I did a bunch of reviews this is the one that I picked this waymax I'll put a link down in the description um uh most of these things they're affiliate links so I do get a little bit of money back from Amazon so hopefully if you enjoy the content that I'm providing then you don't mind it doesn't cost you anymore but I do get a little bit of something for that but this is the scale that I chose and it's typically I would say within a tenth of an ounce so 0.1 you know it'll say 2.1 the uh postal scale will say 2.2 but typically it's the whole numbers so you know there's certain levels so as long as I'm under 4 ounces I tend to to weigh up if the if I put something on here it says 2.1 ounces I'm going to I'm going to round it up to three uh just to give me a little buffer in one year of doing this I've only had two packages that came back with a uh basically a cost or a weight adjustment so it's uh pretty minimal but definitely uh get the scale so like I said um you want to know how much to buy because when you enter those weights in whatever shipping service you use uh you'll see the weight can change um if you get into different categories so having a scale and this thing was only yesterday when I checked it was only 22.88 on Amazon so um very very inexpensive and it will will save you money and remember when you save money you are increasing your profits all right now before we get into the final little bonus section um if you like what I'm doing here as always I would invite you to subscribe to the channel hit the like button hit the little bell that way you'll get a notification when we upload new content now you can see we're branching out um I'm trying to uh you know reach as many viewers as I can with still keeping in the niche of uh directed techn techology so 3D printers lasers CNC you know that kind of stuff but um you know I'm in this to make uh my little business successful so things like shipping those are all important uh as well so with that said let's get into the little bonus [Music] section all right thanks for sticking around I've got a couple little last things um to think about as you try to uh you you know lower uh keep your shipping costs low and increase your profits because that's always good so three things number one um consider free shipping there have been a lot of studies you know places like Etsy um just consumer you know places that do a lot of this and um invest a lot of money into figuring out what makes uh people's minds work and how to to best um you know provide the things that uh will make people want to you know finalize and and hit that purchase button um so these studies show that customers will typically value free shipping over an equivalent discount so you know if I know that it's going to cost no bad example but well hey if I know it's going to cost me $8 to ship something in a flat rate box and I offer a 10 20% discount that is $8 well they don't tend to value that as much as me just saying free shipping and including that into the price you know so even if you're increasing your price by that $8 to cover this when a customer comes to your website or your Etsy shop or whatever and let's say you've got a product that's $50 well it's $50 is what they have in their mind now we all understand tax and you know depending on the state that you live in um we're accustomed to maybe a couple dollars here or there you know that we're going to pay in sales tax but if I think well this product is $50 and I go to check out and I see it's going to cost me another $10 or $8 or whatever in shipping well now I'm at $60 and I've got got that like H well it was worth it you know a minute ago to pay 50 but now that it's 60 I'm not quite sure so when you offer free shipping and that's included into your your price well now that $50 product is still $50 and yeah I got to pay $3 for tax or whatever but I don't have that huge jump so consider offering free shipping um the second thing is nothing is free so whether you're paying shipping all all this you know packaging the 20 cents that you pay for this the 5 cents you pay for bubble wrap whatever you're putting in that package remember that's either something that the customer has to pay for or it's coming out of your profit so make sure that you're well aware of how much you are paying per product to get things to your customers and include that in your final price now the last thing um not really a tip but just kind of a I guess a pet peeve um don't get these for free and then ship them in some other way you know trying to trick the system some people will put these in bubble mailers or they'll put them in you know a brown paper wrap um like I said nothing is free these cost the Postal Service money they are giving them to you free because they know that they're going to charge you 8 to $10 to ship whatever is in here um when you take these for nothing and then use them and don't pay the USPS uh you know to ship them at the amount that they calculated to give you this for free what happens the postal rates go up so now not only do you pay more to ship this but you pay more for everything uh the Postal Service doesn't tend to make a profit it's not why they're there but when they lose money on something like this they have to make up for it and then they just raise your rates so little things um but again hope you enjoyed this video if you liked it let me know if you hated it let me know um I'm just trying to make life better out there for everybody so once again thanks for uh coming to the channel hope you learn something today and as always let's just keep on learning [Music] together