Preparing Etsy and eBay Listings for the USPS Postage Hike

Don’t forget, USPS rates are going up tomorrow (Sunday, the 27^th).  Be prepared.

I spent a good part of today updating my shipping profiles in Etsy and unfortunately removing my free shipping on eBay and my website.

Here’s the chart I used for the new pricing levels. 



To change your Etsy listings, go Shop Settings, then Shipping & Payment



Next, you can either edit a previous shipping profile or create a new one.



Here’s what the editing (or creating) screen looks like for shipping profiles.  I give mine names that indicate the exact shipping weight, but you can give them whatever names work best for you.



If you do plan to offer international shipping, don’t forget to put a “check mark” in the box next to Everywhere Else.  Merely filling in the prices, won’t add that option to your listing unless you mark the box indicating you do ship everywhere else.  It’s my understanding that if you don’t have it marked, your listings don’t show up in the international searches.

After you’ve got all the shipping profiles you need, go back to the shipping page and prepare for semi-awesomeness.



Changing a shipping profile does NOT change it in each listing, but you can bulk update your listings relatively easily.  The only downside is Etsy not showing us what our previous shipping profiles were for each item.



And that’s it for Etsy.

Updating your eBay listings is easy if you previous used “Calculated: Cost varies by buyer’s location”. 



If you used “Flat: same cost to all buyers”, you will need to adjust each listing (I recommend “calculated” based on weight/location).

For package type, I select “Package (or thick envelope)”, but I don’t bother with dimensions.  My items are never close to the dimension limits.



Then there’s a separate section for international shipping options.



So if you’ve always had your eBay shipping costs calculated based on weight and location, you won’t have to do anything regarding the USPS postage hike. 

Unfortunately for me, I will be switching by eBay listings from free shipping, so I have to go into each listing one at a time and revise them all.

At the end of the day, if a customer is over-charged for shipping (which I know once I package their item/s and print the postage), I always refund them the overage if it’s more than $1.

By the way, if you print your postage online, you often get a little discount so the postage will be a little less than what’s shown in my chart above. 

In Etsy, there is a field to indicate how much additional postage a given item will incur if shipped with other items in the same order. 

In eBay, if you use “calculated”, you don’t need to worry about multiple items because eBay just adds up their weights and makes a total based on that.  If you use “flat rate” in eBay, then you do have the option of defining a charge for shipping of multiple items.

I hope some of this info ends up being helpful to someone.

Have fun!