Need Help: Free Shipping Option

[RadRobo]

Hello,
I'm new to eBid. I am exploring other options to feebay.

I am trying to set up my first listing and want to offer a free shipping option. However, I do not see a way to do this?

I typically offer the free economy shipping and then also offer faster methods of shipping should the buyer want to pay for them.

Any help on how to accomplish this?

Thank you in advance!

Kennedy

[bluebedouin]

In the drop down menu,there's an option for Free Shipping.

[bluebedouin]

You can add more than one option by clicking the + button.

[gbsbks2010]

You can add more than one option by clicking the + button.

Thanks bluebedouin, I didn't know about the free shipping option - always learning here.

[RadRobo]

Ah. I see. It is only available as an option when you use "Flat" cost shipping, not when you use calculated shipping. This seems strange to me.

Kennedy

[JanetB]

Ah. I see. It is only available as an option when you use "Flat" cost shipping, not when you use calculated shipping. This seems strange to me.

Kennedy

Why the need to calculate shipping if you are offering it for free?

[RadRobo]

Well, the free option is for economy shipping. It is rather slow. I like to also offer faster shipping options if customers are willing to pay for it.

[squern]

Welcome to eBid - the friendly site.
You could show the faster shipping option as standard, but put a note into the listing that free shipping was available for a slower service.
You could make it free by giving a 100% discount in the shipping part of the invoice.
For safety, you would have to say, in the listing, how long the slower service would take.
The advantage would be that you could put free shipping in the title, to attract buyers. You might find that, this way round, most buyers would opt for the paid service.
So you would get all the advantage, without all of the cost.

Good luck

[Idealproductsales]

I agree. However... As a current *the place not to be named* seller , I would actually suggest that at eBid perhaps one would be better served to offer the lowest possible price, considering the tiny fees that are charged , and offer calculated shipping instead of "free ship on top".

It is more fair all around - We, too, do the Free Ship Thing.. plus calculated ship options (on the other place) - However, while this is *very* (if not excessively) profitable to us, it is not quite fair to the buyer, as they are paying full shipping in addition to the free shipping cost that is worked into the selling price.

With eBid you need to remember there is not as much traffic, a majority of sales likely will come from Google product search and SEO, so the strategies that work very well for eBay (and their "Crappini" search engine) are not so effective here.. - Title changes often work much better when relevant keywords that buyers search on google (as opposed to eBay buyers) , as well as offering the lowest selling price while maintaining your profit margin, factoring in the fact that your fees here will be FAR LESS, and thus, your cost per sale will likewise be far less. Then, if you choose to NOT use Paypal, (not particularly recommended) you can also drop the transaction cost which any pro seller will factor in to item costs.. That rock bottom "lowest price anywhere" price will be more attractive to buyers who are searching and often sorting by "price low to high" , and then your calculated shipping (Which calculates at USPS published market rates, not the Commerical pricing that many pro sellers benefit from, so you still make a little profit even without adding handling cost to the listing!) will be much more fair, and reasonable. Take a 3 ounce first class package you may normally offer free shipping on (with the $2 or whatever tacked on to your target selling price..) list it on ebid for $2.50 less (if not more) , and then let USPS calculated rate go at that 3 Oz, you may find you actually come out a little bit ahead!

That'd be my advice (coming from a gold TRS powerseller shipping over 1200 pkgs a month from our other venues, if that matters) Don't forget to optimize your listing description and titles the same as you might for your own website - Keyword rich descriptions that are clear and make sense will get better results, since these are being indexed by Google search engine, rather than the "Crappini" engine on the other place.

I am at present trying to find some way to efficiently list our current inventory here, but just have not had time. - Over 2600 listings over there, and probably at least 5000 more that need to be done and written up.. eBid REALLY needs to come up with at least a basic API that external programmers can tie in to and build a lister that works effectively (I've tried to promote ebid over at SixBit forums, with any luck, enough pressure from the developer side of things, they might actually have an API here someday soon!)

If eBid really wants to get serious and pull in sellers with massive inventory (If it was not for the time constraints, I could easily list over 20,000 products in stock for same day shipment!) , they *MUST* put some effort into building an API that can at least allow big multi-channel sellers to list on eBid - Without it, the time spent to build spreadsheets (not even considering the bandwidth to upload pictures) and revise titles/descriptions (With SixBit, we can have a different template set for each place we list) , it really is not worth it to list in large volumes that we could easily be listing, at the thin margins we work with.
Would have to be able to make $12K/month in sales here alone (averaging $10/per transaction minimum) to hire someone to manage eBid Listings (otherwise, it just isn't a good ROI) - but that would take even longer to achieve.. so it's kind of the rock and a hard place issue. If we could find a time-efficient way to convert our current database of listings from SixBit , to upload to eBid, We'd have thousands of listings here with product that is on the shelf and ready to ship tomorrow.

[RadRobo]

Thanks for all of the input. I did not understand how much differently search would work on this site. I understood there would be fewer visitors, but not how the search engines work.
However, it seems that offering free shipping is becoming a standard in the retail world, would you agree?

Kennedy