eBay Shipping Australia – eBay Postal Rates Table

How to setup the eBay postal rates table including drop shipping.

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Transcribe of “eBay Shipping Australia – eBay Postal Rates Table”

eBay Shipping Australia – eBay Postal Rates Table

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately asking how to set up the eBay postal rates table. If you’re not familiar with the eBay postal rates table and what it can do for you, especially if you have a drop-ship business , import business and/or you ship larger items, let me first quickly explain now. I’ll also explain how to set up the eBay postal rates table for both drop shipping and shipping from yours, or your suppliers’ warehouses.

eBay Postal rates tables definition

eBay postal rates tables are especially useful if you’re an eBay dropship seller and/or you’re shipping larger items. Of course, Australia is a huge country. Before eBay brought out the eBay postal rates tables, we would offer free flat-rate shipping across Australia.

Now, this of course meant we’d make good profits from shipping when customers were local. However, when customers were from far away..  Like some mining camp in the back of Western Australia, or some island off the coast of Queensland.  Or Western Australia…  We’d very often lose money with these orders.

Free eBay flat-rate shipping across Australia

For years before the first eBay postal rates table were released in Australia. Our eBay reps were continually on to me about free shipping and they would say. Customers love free shipping we’ve surveyed it! You’ve got to do free shipping!

We knew this we knew that customers loved free shipping, if you sit around with friends… you’ll hear people say…

“I’ve bought this… then they’ll have a pause, and I got free shipping!” You know human beings…  We all know there’s no such thing as free shipping. But you know, people do buy more if you offer free shipping.

There’s no such thing as free shipping on eBay

So eBay saying,  you’ve got to offer eBay free shipping. Of course, this is all well and good but as everybody knows, there’s no such thing as free shipping!

You know someones paying for that of course.  In this case it was me. So what we used to do, if the items are being shipped from Sydney? From say a Sydney warehouse, we’d base our free shipping cost to Adelaide. Whatever amount it cost to ship from Sydney to Adelaide. We would add that amount of money onto the selling price and offer the item as free shipping. For example, if we were selling an item for $100, and the cost of shipping from Sydney to Adelaide was $20. We’d list the item for $120 with free shipping Australia wide.

If somebody bought the item in say Sydney.  We would, of course, make more money, because we’d budgeted on the price to ship to Adelaide. But if somebody bought in say Perth, the cost of shipping would be higher than our budgeted Adelaide. Therefore the extra cost would eat right into our profit margin.

If somebody from a mining camp in the back of Broome or somebody in Rottnest Island purchased the item. We’d invariably lose money.  What we discovered, there is a lot of people in those remote areas, hanging over their keyboard, or with saved searches.  Waiting for an eBay seller to list a heavy item like a gazebo, a pool pump, a skateboard… whatever with free shipping.

eBay postal rates tables

I remember once listing a kid’s ride-on car with free shipping and within minutes the first sale came through from the Northern Territory. Now, that was a $400 lesson, but that’s another story for another day. Now, with the latest eBay postal rates tables, you can set up to a hundred different zones. And offer free shipping in whatever areas you choose, and even more importantly, you can charge customers in the other zones. Whatever amount you choose.

Free shipping through eBay postal rates table

Yes, it’s a bit of a pain to set up the rates tables but it’s well worth it.  You’ll find most of your competition won’t bother. Now, using the eBay postal rates tables, you can set up eBay free shipping in just a few zones, and charge different amounts for all the other zones. And you can also totally exclude zones that you, or your supplier, or your shipping company doesn’t ship to. You can also have up to, now, 20 different rates tables. So you can set up different rates tables for different areas, different warehouses, and/or different courier companies.

This is especially useful if you are dropshipping using multiple warehouses or multiple suppliers. Even if they’re in different states. If you use the eBay postal rates table, you can be much more aggressive in price, in your local area.

eBay postal rates table is useful for eBay dropshipping

If you’re shipping your goods from Sydney and you want to just ship from Sydney to Brisbane to say Melbourne, you’ve only got to budget in the price of that. You don’t have to budget in sucking eggs to ship it to these other remote places. An example is if you’re shipping from Sydney you don’t need to budget for some buyer who’s getting free shipping from the back of Darwin. This means that you can be much more aggressive on pricing out the Eastern seaboard, if that’s where your warehouse or the warehouses that you’re shipping from.

eBay Postal rates table

Anyway, I hope that makes sense, let’s go get on with how to do it. Now, before you can set up the postal rates table on eBay. You need to have shipping prices from whatever shipping company that you’re using.

Australia Post eBay shipping prices

If you’re dropshipping and therefore your suppliers are doing all the shipping for you. Start with getting hold of Australia Post shipping prices. I’ve put a link on the screen. Where you can download a pdf now which has all the latest Australia post shipping costs broken down to the same regions as eBay. Also, it’ll include another pdf which also shows the area which eBay puts at each region, should help you out.

Steps in setting up your first eBay postal rates table:

Okay, so once you’ve downloaded that, the first step in setting up your first postal rates table is to go to the URL which I’ve put on the screen. Save that URL on your browser as one of your favorites so you can go back to it whenever you wish. When you go to that URL, you should see this page.

When you get to that page, click on the edit button to the right of where it says, use postal rates table. Now on this page first choose whether you want to base your shipping on price, weight or surcharge. Personally, we always only use weight. Next, give this eBay postal rates table a name.

Here you can see I’ve just called this rates table ‘Test’. This is one of our eBay demo accounts. Next, before we start adding zones, note that there’s an express section and a standard delivery section. In this demonstration, I’m just going to use the standard delivery. They both get set up exactly the same.

So now, in the standard delivery, click on the plus sign to add a region. Let’s start with New South Wales. Click the down arrow, next to New South Wales, then choose one of the three regions, and then click the blue save button at the bottom.

Now you’ll see the areas located within that region. Now add the other two regions, one at a time. The reason you add them separately one at a time is so that you can charge a different amount for each zone. If you just click all three at once, you’ll be charging the same amount for all three regions.

Use Australia Post prices

So now you can add the cost of shipping which you need to get from either Australia Post, use the link I put up above a moment ago, or you can use whichever shipping service that you wish. Like I mentioned above if you’re dropshipping, it’s easier if you just use Australia Post prices. Now, the way that the postal rates table is set up in eBay it’s set up like most couriers and Australia post, where they have a base rate, and then have a per kilo price. So, for instance, the base rate might be say six dollars for a particular region which includes the first 500 grams.

The worst part in setting up the first eBay postal rates table

And then it could be say, 50 cents extra per kilo, now when you’ve entered some prices in the there make sure you hit the save button at the bottom so you don’t lose all of your work, (ask me how I know that). Once you hit the save button, you should get the congratulations screen, well done, now it’s time to make another coffee, as you completed the worst part, if you got up to this part, give yourself a big pat on the back, because, most of your competitors won’t get his far.

Connect your listings to the eBay Postal rates table

Okay, so the next step is to connect your listings to the rates table, to do this, go into eBay and revise one of your listings and scroll down to the postage section near the bottom, and select flat-same cost to all buyers. Now you’d be able to see the new postal rates table, note though, this bit had myself and my team flummoxed for hours or even days.

Enable the eBay postal rates table

You know, if you do not select flat rate shipping, your eBay postal rates table will not show. Okay now that your eBay postal rates table is showing, you can now click the checkbox to enable the eBay postal rates table to work on that listing. Now you can also do this, in bulk, if you have hundreds or thousands of listings.

Now to prove this is working, view your listing in eBay and click on the “see details” button like in this screen shot. Here you can enter any postcode to see exactly how much shipping eBay will be showing your buyers. eBay can do this as it knows the buyers’ postcode.  In each listing you can add the postcode of your supplier so you can revise any eBay listing down the bottom.  You can put in whatever postcode you wish to where your supplier is.

A big tip on using eBay dropshipping

Now here you can enter a few postcodes i.e Sydney 2000, Darwin 0801 etcetera. Now here’s a big tip if you’re dropshipping, with most dropship suppliers they don’t show how much an item weighs. So without that information, you don’t know what weight to enter into each of your eBay listings.

Now before we figured out what I’m about to show you now, we used to contact the suppliers, you know via phone email live chat if they offered live chat, and this wasted so much time. The supplier couldn’t immediately give us the weight, we’d be forever chasing the supplier up and this used to waste so much time, so what we do now is very fast, and does not require contacting the supplier at all.

eBay shipping calculator.

So let’s say your eBay dropship supplier is selling a widget.  On their website, it doesn’t show the weight of the widget, but like almost all dropship suppliers, they have a shipping calculator. So all you do is enter three or four postcodes, into their shipping calculator, and get their shipping prices.

Let’s say for example you’d do this and the shipping costs for this widget to Sydney is $25, Darwin is  $50 and Perth is $75. What you do next is list the item on eBay and guess a weight, it doesn’t matter what it is, just guess a weight. Let’s say your guess was 10 kilos, enter the 10 kilos into the eBay listing when you create the listing or when you revise it. Then click or then view the listing and click on the see details link as I mentioned above and put in the exact same three postcodes as you entered into the suppliers website in their shipping calculator and see what prices eBay will be charging your customers.

The amount that eBay shows, will normally either, of course, be higher or lower than because you guessed your weight. All you do now is go back to your listing and adjust your guess weight so you know, if eBay is going to charge your customer not enough you go back and change your ten kilos to 12 kilos, you know, or the other way around so this way you can do it very, very quickly.

eBay Postal rate table is really worth it!

A one or two dollar virtual assistant can do this whole procedure of figuring out exactly how much something weighs in just a few minutes, and before I get bombarded again with emails about where to get virtual assistance from, one to two dollars per hour I’ll put a link on the screen.

Now, the bit I love about guessing the weight and adjusting it to match is we don’t have to wait for suppliers to get back to us, we’re back in control. Anyway a bit of a long one this week, but the eBay postal rate table is really worth it. Yes I know it’ll be frustrating but just remember, most of your competitors won’t do it.

That’s all for this week, please scroll on down, leave me a comment below, until next week, list more, sell more, this is Neil Waterhouse.

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