Shipping

[bristol_automotive_parts]

Good day fellow eBayers!

I work for a little home-town automotive business. We decided to open up an eBay store to help circulate our NOS (New Old Stock). When I say NOS... I mean it...over 45 years of it! This has been quite the challenge...starting from scratch. I am having a difficult time with the shipping options for some of our items. We started with our exhaust y-pipes. Yes, probably some of the most difficult to ship. We have figured out our shipping details.

My question is, now that I finally get to it, we have thousands of items to list. There is no way I can manually check each part for the proper shipping dimensions and weights. It is not cost effective to do this and is way too time consuming. We have made contact with some of the vendors to assist with information gathering but it has not been helpful in this situation. I wasn't sure how to tackle this so I have most of our listings at "Local Pick-Up"... with the option for a shipping quote. Is there anyone who can tell me how I can successfully list all these items, with shipping options included, without the chance of getting axed on shipping or manually gathering all the info I need? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Here are a couple of pictures to show you what I am dealing with. This is a very small percent of inventory. I greatly appreciate your time!

Melanie

[autopartspuller]

I was speaking with a local shop that specializes in exhausts and he said that UPS account is the way to go.  He said that he has a "tag and go" account.  He doesnt box his pre-bent pipe, just tags it and calls for a pickup.  He says it's much cheaper than any other method of shipping exhaust.

[jr-41ford]

A couple of years ago, I started a FedEx account and started receiving a 25 to 30 percent discount on my shipping. I really like it, make my labels at home, take it to a FedEx shipping center and done. When I receive my credit card statement, I just pay it off.

A couple of weeks ago, had to return an item to Amazon and asked UPS if they offered a discount. Nope!

[autopartspuller]

I dont currently have an Account with UPS but, they absolutely offer a discount if you have a an arranged business account.  They dont for the average customer account though.  They are cheaper than fedex also with that discount when it comes to large oversized items.  The reason I stopped using them is because they are pretty **bleep** **bleep**ty when it comes to thier damage claims.  I had a couple cases where it was blatently thier fault (one item was ran over by what looked like a fork lift) and I still lost.  So I stopped using them.

I do like fed-ex and they are the company I currently use for my shipping.  With the discount they are just slightly more expensive on my larger items, but they do seem to care for them better that UPS ever did plus, on the occassion when it is obviously thier fault that an item is damaged, they will actuall pay out...... They however have stricter limits on weight and size of an item than UPS, which may be an issue for the op.

[jr-41ford]

I'm not a big fan of UPS, their service has deteriorated a while back. They delievered a package last month, a small plastic flat table, had a big hole through the box and table. Did the return with Amazon and sent it back. Last week got the replacement.

I spoke to the UPS guy, he remembered the package and I asked why he delivered it when it was obvious that it was damaged during shipping. He said I needed to be there to refuse it, was gone most of the day when it was delivered. 

The box the new table was in had damage too, but not damage to the table. I've seen packages roughed up a lot more than this one... a lot more.