My name is kia jay. I am the CEO of taylor beauty’s, so you guys have asked for more entrepreneurship articles, and today I have a special article for you guys. So in today’s article I am going to be giving you all the tea on how to ship your products at a low cost. So we’re all here because we’re a business we’ve been shipping out products, but we’re really confused about how to get those products shipped out at the lowest cost.
The benefits of understanding shipping rates is one. It gives you a huge value to your customer because you’re not charging your customer an arm and a leg for shipping and to really it also helps with customer service, because it also gives you an idea of how long it’s going to take you to get a Product from your office or wherever you ship from to that customers door. So today I’m going to be talking about shipping rates, as well as different shipping options and pretty much transit time.
I use a combination of the United States, Postal Service UPS, FedEx and DHL, depending on where my item is going, but overall today I’m only going to talk about the USPS because for a small business I find that this is the most cost effective way to ship Out of idem, so a lot one of the biggest mistakes that I see a lot of small businesses make. Is they try to get these personalized packages to ship out to a customer and what I mean personalized? Let’s take this, for example, this is the envelope right and one of the things they want.
A cute pink envelope will all of their writing and stuff on it and they want this nice pretty packaging, and I think that is okay, but keep in mind that costs money. Not only does it cost money to you, but you have to also charge your customer. Your customer for that as well, so I like to stay away from branded envelopes. I like some nicely packaged my stuff inside that way. We that way, you’re able to provide a good value to the customer because they’re not overpaying for packaging.
So when it comes to the United States Postal Service, they do offer a lot of different ways to ship items and understand in the different ways that they have to ship items is what’s really going to help you save money on your packaging, so there’s different levels To the United States Postal Service, so the first thing we’re going to start with is first-class mail right, so first-class mail is basically anything that weighs under a pound.
So if you are shipping an item and it weighs under a pound, you never want to ship it Priority Mail 1, because that’s going to make your price hike even more and 2, because you want to give your you want to give the best value to your Customer and really give your customer the best value in their shipping rates. So when it comes to the first-class mail, one thing you have to understand is you: do have to purchase your own packaging for anything that costs under a pound.
So so, if you are a business, the first thing you want to do is kind of figure out. How much is my item going to weigh so understanding? How much your item is going to weigh is really going to help. You understand how you’re going to package this item each and every single time that you ship out item anything that weighs less than a pound one. It’s the envelope is fairly light. It weighs less than an ounce.
So it’s not going to be very heavy. I like to use a scale I’ll leave a link below to the scale that I like to use. You want to always make sure you weigh your items before you ship it out it usually shits for under $ 5, depending on where it’s going and also you also want to make sure when you include that rate, you include a lot of things. Some of the things you want to include is you want to include how much it costs a package so include that in your shipping rate, as well so, for instance, figuring out about how much your envelopes cost and how much other things cost now.
I know a lot of times: people don’t like to use these generic envelopes, but keep in mind. Sometimes when you get the personalized envelopes, they can cost you about a dollar or two, if you’re not buying a whole lot at one time, it can be very expensive. So, keep in mind that you can always save money, finding a supplier that that gives you a very low cost and if you think that this is not great, also think about how you can package that item to make it look good.
I like to package my items to keep it under a pound very nicely and also because I know the envelope is not the best. I do like to personalize packages by adding thank-you notes, and things like that took my customers, this class. Let’s talk about Priority Mail Priority Mail is anything that weighs over a pound and priority milk can get expensive. That’s why I say understanding how much your stuff weighs now, if there’s stuff weighs over a pound, you want to figure out.
You want to go the priority mail route. The thing that I love about Priority Mail is that you can get free shipping supplies from the Postal Service, so you can go online to the United States. Postal Service com go onto that website and actually they can give you all of you can get all of your ship and supplies for free and you can order as much as you want. Unlimited amounts – and that’s what I like so here – are some options of some free items that come through the double United States Postal Service.
You can get some milled to your business or to your home wherever you want to get the mail to so this is a flat rate envelope. The United States Postal Service has a lot of different flat rate envelopes. The thing that I like about the flat rate envelope is that if your item weighs over a pound, it doesn’t matter how much it weighs it’s always going to be a the same price depending on where in the United States its shipping to so.
This is a good asset to use if you are if it could fit in the envelope, but it’s more than a pound, because this is probably one of the lower prices, then, even if it is a pound, they still offer other different options like this, which is Just a regular box that you can ship and then they also have other types of boxes, which is flat rate boxes. So if you’re, you have a lot of stuff but you’re shipping it in the box, you can get yourself flat rate box, so showing you guys an example of shipping, something flat rate versus not shipping it flat rate.
Let’s say I wanted to ship something from Atlanta, Georgia to New York, just using a fake addresses and I’m shipping to the Empire State Building, and so let’s say that package weighs ten pounds now, here’s the difference. If a package weighs ten pounds and you shipping your own box, not provided by the United States Postal Service, it costs you twenty five dollars as opposed to shipping it in a medium flat rate box, and that is thirteen sixty five and it also has flat rate Boxes on their site, like a region, a box which is way cheaper and it’s actually the same size as a medium flat rate box.
So the same item that you could have shipped for twenty five dollars at ten pounds. If you go on their website and order free supplies, this is comparable to a box and it’s eight dollars and 15 cents. So those are the things that I like to do. Another option to help you save money on shipping is, if you are a business that does ship out a large value. My business has grown to the point where I ship out a large volume of stuff.
So the great thing that I love about you States Postal Service. This article is not sponsored. I just I just loved their customer service. So much, but one of the things that I absolutely love is, I have an Account Manager with them. So, basically, what an Account Manager is is somebody who looks over the total amount of items that you’re shipping out and basically what you get to a certain volume there.
You get two different tiers of value. Your prices can go down. So if you are shipping out at a large value, I definitely encourage you to find a manager that can help you really advocate for you. I have a manager that really advocates for me helps me get the best price on my shipping, as well as make sure that I have a pickup every single day at at convenient times. So just keep that. Keep that in mind.
Another thing about Priority Mail is that what Priority Mail um as opposed to first-class, sometimes first-class, will take about five days to ship. So keep that in mind, but snow Priority Mail usually takes up to three days to ship, but also a great thing about the United States. Postal Service is that you have tracking, so you can provide your customers with tracking options so once your business does grow like I said you, you can get an account manager, and not only can you do that with the US Postal Service, but FedEx and FedEx and Ups and DHL all have that option where they will also advocate for you to get the best pricing the thing of the thing about using those companies as opposed to the United States Postal Service is, unfortunately, they do not offer these great shipping boxes.
The United States Postal Service has so many different options for a boxing. That’s why I do like that. So yes, so there are also other services that you can use in addition to having an Account Manager, there’s sites, there’s different sites like Stan’s, comm, ship station and sites, like that, where all of your orders will come into one. It’s called the API it’ll come in two there and then it’ll upload all of your shipments at one time.
So you can kind of print out all your labels at one time. So if you’re a business and you’re you’re, you have like 30, you have like 30 orders a week. I definitely would not recommend using a service like that one because you do have to pay a monthly fee and that might cut into that might cut into the monthly fees. So when I was operating on a very small level with my business, what I would do is I would go into the United States, Postal Service website and I would manually type up each and every each and every label.
I would already know my weights and things like that, and I would print out my labels, one by one PayPal does offer this as well. If you have you have, if your payment method is PayPal, PayPal does also offer where you can print out multiple labels at one time. So just kind of check on your website see what options you have for having labels and if you are a small business, it’s really great to understand your pricing on how much you are going to spend on each thing rather than kind of winging it.
As you go along, I would definitely recommend if you are starting out or if you already start out order, every single or every single free priority mail box that they have going USPS. You can’t go wrong because it’s free and packaged your stuff in the boxes and see which one is going to be the lowest for you to ship and once you the good thing about that, is anything that you don’t need. You can always just go to the post office and leave it there for somebody else who may need it.
So I definitely recommend that when your business starts, operating and business is really booming, then that’s when I recommend to use the third-party websites like stamps.Com substation and things like that, because using those webs using those websites will help, will save you a lot of time. But you know there are fees that come along with that. So make sure your business is ready for something like that.
But, like I said the more you start, shipping out, you can get an account manager to help advocate for you to really make sure you’re getting the best price on shipping as possible. So I hope this article was helpful for you guys. I hope I was able to explain that very well. A few hot guys have any questions. Leave me some questions in the comments below I’ll leave. The link to the scale that I like to use, as well as everything that was mentioned in this article.
So I’ll see you guys in my next entrepreneurship series make sure if you have any requests, you guys leave them down below and thank you so much for reading.
Jimmy's Internet Marketing Business Blog 