Combining Shipping on Multiple Items
Tips and FAQ for a Home Business

If you are selling groups of items - say batches of CDs - then you will often get people who win multiple of your auctions and who want to combine shipping charges. This is of course fair. If you send five CDs to a person, it will cost less than if you sent a single CD to five different people. However, it will not be FREE for the additional CDs :) I still get one or two clueless people every once in a while who think those additional CDs somehow magically become weightless :)

The point is that one CD in an envelope might cost say $1.50 to ship to somewhere. If you stick another CD into that envelope, the price might only go up to $2 for that "package". You as the seller only had to pay for one envelope, not 2. You only had to drive to the post office once. You only used one piece of paper to print out for the invoice. So all of these end up being savings for you. It's quite fair for you to therefore charge the buyer less for total shipping costs.

I don't have any hard or fast rules with my own shippings, because every case is different. If someone buys 4 CDs it might fit into an envelope which is light. If they buy 5 CDs it might now have to go into a box which is heavier and sort of counteracts the volume discount. If someone buys 2 CDs by one band, the liner notes might be super slim and therefore weigh only a little. If they buy 3 CDs from another bad, there might be HUGE liner notes, plus outside cardboard sleeves and it could weigh twice as much.

So when an auction ends, I gather up the items to go out to a given person. This includes whatever packaging I'm going to have to use, the invoice piece of paper, etc. I put them all onto the scale and see how much they all weigh. Normally I charge $3 for a single CD to go out to a person in the US, which covers the postage, envelope cost, paper / printing cost for the invoice, gas to drive there and back, etc. So let's say the postage for that single CD shipping cost would have been $1.50. If the person bought TWO CDs instead, and the postage now was going to be $2.50, I would probably charge the person $4 total for the combined shipping package. If the two CD package had to use a larger envelope, because they wouldn't fit into my standard single-size CD envelope, then I might have to charge them $5 total for the combined package. The point here is to give them a reasonable discount - but not to lose money. If you start losing money on your sales, then it's not fair to you either.

I have actually lost money on shipping before, because I didn't weigh the items out before I gave the quote. Someone would pay $3 in shipping, and it'd end up costing me $4 to send the item out to the person - so I lost money not only on the extra postage, but now I was not even being paid for the envelope / gas / etc. If the item was bought for only 99 cents - that means I paid money to send the item out to the buyer :) So that is always an important balance. Make sure that you are fair - but that you are at least breaking even on your auction. In the end if you break even, then you've still gotten clutter out of your home and are increasing your eBay rating. So that's fine to do once or twice, but will harm your budget if you make it a standard practice :)

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