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Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.
Unti they bring pricing down on small packages to match USPS First Class it’ll be a no go.. we already get raped with being forced into free shipping and returns.. every package will continue to go out with the cheapest trackable shipping method possible.
I agree 100% with shut1968 .
I have listed items free shipping/free returns to get them higher in search results (I hope), but I gave up shipping with eBay/Paypal years ago. I went with Stamps.com and don’t like the subscription costs, but the savings more than offset the charge — especially the hours of time it saves me, and I only need 12 pages of paper for a yearly postage summary spreadsheet it creates automatically, instead of individual receipts and I have to do all the math by hand. Not to mention the frustrating “system unavailable try later ” time waster I would REPEATEDLY get trying to use eBay/Paypal.
Beyond that, I HAVE used UPS and the best way for me is shipping through a commercial account (which I don’t have). A local small business is generous enough to let me use theirs. I can’t even get a shipping quote online because I do not have their number to plug in (and for privacy reasons, do not want it). That said, my experience has been terrible damage on packages – almost certainly at the sorting centers – our drivers are great. One package arrived so badly damaged that the shipping store where they packed my purchases (thank goodness they packed as defensively as they did) is now using the photos I sent them for employee training!
I have had exactly the opposite experience with USPS – of hundreds of packages I have shipped, perhaps 3 or 4 have been smashed enough to damage contents. (That said, it does help to pack defensively, but in my own experience the difference in UPS handling vs USPS is dramatic.) I did try a UPS account for a while, but gave it up after reading the back of the waybill about what was and was not insurable. I hope they have changed that, it was a few years ago.
The little niceties UPS is offering, per the news release, are not even a consideration for me. Until they pay a LOT more attention to care and handling, I’m not interested. All the bennies they are offering aren’t — to me — worth the aggravation of trying to deal with a package smashed badly enough to destroy its contents, having to file an insurance claim after both the recipient and myself spending a lot of time documenting damage, and then fighting them to come through on the insurance.