Published on: November 3rd, 2023
Good morning! Happy Paradox Rift release day! One of the things we have discovered the last two days is shipping costs are high. eBay defaults you to USPS Ground Advantage, which starts at $5 before discounts. That’s too high if you wanted to sell a low-priced, single card or if you want to sell bulk commons. Having accurate shipping weights and dimensions is important if you want to minimize shipping costs. That’s when we discovered Standard Envelopes.
How it works
eBay standard envelope services are competitively priced and include seller benefits like integrated tracking and shipment protections at no additional cost.
eBay
Eligible categories
- Patches (as of Nov 1, 2023)
- Stickers & Decals (as of Nov 1, 2023)
- Greeting Cards (as of Nov 1, 2023)
- Seeds (as of Nov 1, 2023)
- Trading Cards (the one we care about)
- Coins & Currency
- Postcards
- Stamps
Requirements
Meeting the requirements are important. The most important are size, weight, dimensions, and uniform thickness.
- Envelopes need to be flexible enough to bend accordingly through machine rollers
- If your envelope or flat mailer isn’t uniformly thick and/or has bumps or lumps, it may be classified as a package
- The maximum thickness allowed is ¼ inch
- A plain, number 10 envelope works just fine
- Any envelope that fits the following specifications:
- No smaller than 3.5” x 5”
- No larger than 6.125” x 11.5”
- No heavier than 3 oz
- No plastic, strings or closures
- Recipient address is parallel to envelope’s longest side
- Uniform thickness not greater than .25”
Category Recommendations
Trading cards
- Ship no more than 15 raw cards per package per envelope
- Ship no more than 2 cards in top loaders
- No graded cards
It’s the first point that is most exciting to us. We can sell individual rares and bulk commons. We are working through what’s the lowest we can charge to make selling bulk commons work.
Most important
As part of this partnership with USPS, tracking and protection is included. This was previously only available for packages.
- When you use the eBay standard envelope service, you’ll automatically receive integrated, limited tracking for your orders
- Once shipped, you and your buyer can track the package within My eBay, SellerHub, or transaction history (a great benefit for having communication in oke place)
- Each shipment includes up to $20 of shipment protection on single-item orders and up to $50 on combined orders
eBay has a turnkey solution
eBay sells their own envelopes with trading card inserts. We are deeply considering getting 100 for $41.33. That would work out to 41 cents per envelope, which we would need to add to our overall price or as a handling charge.
Final thoughts
The key point is setting the shipping dimensions properly. The options we found working for us are below. The Service menu is dynamic based on the Package details. Any dimension exceeding the standard envelope size will cause the eBay Standard Envelope option to be removed. This was a great surprise to us. We were so happy to get the option to show up and added we re-did all of our single card auctions yesterday.
We share this information that it may help other eBay sellers to minimize shipping cost, make more sales, and satisfy more customers. This shipping configuration is a big deal for us. It’s exclusive to the eBay / USPS partnership. That means selling trading cards through our Shopify website took another hit.
Happy selling!
Sincerely yours,
smilingdad
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